Retroactive downtime notification (naughty, sorry!) - eviltoast

Some of you might or might not know, but I had to do the final stage of migrating the images that make up the back end of feddit.uk

As it was one of those potentially horrible jobs (millions of files on a live site), I didn’t want to do it until I had a sec to focus on it fully.
Which meant I was just not getting around to it.

This evening, I got started on duplicating the folder, and doing the initial dry-run of the sync.
After realising the sync would only take 10 minutes or so, I decided that I might as well just stop the instance for a few half an hour, and get it over with. Otherwise it might have been another month until I got to it.
Plus, it’s good to restart things occasionally (and makes sure that we can!)

Rough overview was:

  • Backup run
  • Site taken down to avoid generating new image files
  • Current image folder copied to a new location
  • Missing files added in at the new location
  • Old location moved to temporary folder for safety
  • New location moved to old location
  • Permissions re-applied
  • Site brought back up

And to-do, once it’s been running for a few days:

  • Delete temporary folder that’s chewing up a third of a TB.

That’s all folks
Question away if you like.
Light ribbing about it being a retroactive downtime notification is no problem, so long as it’s in good humour.