First things first: you aren’t alone.  Second thing: it has nothing to do with E-Blah.  I feel I have to explain this each week to people now, so I’ll go over this once and for all, and point everyone else that ever has this issue to the answer located on this thread.

There are generally a few ideas as to why data suddenly disappears from E-Blah.  That majority is due to disk space issues.  There may be other server-based issues, such as drives that are networked (which really, I think, is a bad practice) or things such as power failures (if you have your own server, use an UPS).

Common responses from members when we state that they are running out of space is that they have 100GB’s of space and are only using 1% of it.  There is nothing wrong with this; however, there is a difference between logical disk space and physical disk space.  A shared hosting provider normally is not going to expect all their users to use their full account space (if they did they wouldn’t be able to host near as many people).  There’s a little math involved, which isn’t difficult, basically if you host 100 websites, giving each user 100GB’s of space, that’s about 10TB’s.  Obviously it’s pretty much impossible that the provider is going to have 10TB’s of storage on their server.  But if most users only use just a little hard disk space on a 1TB drive, it’s easily accomplishable.

The next case may be that you have 500MB’s of space, and your actual site uses 300MB’s of space.  Some servers may run nightly backups, and during this time your site may use more than your allotted 500MB’s of space.  This means that you’ve just went over your limit, and your servers operating system will not allow new data to be written (and for some reason just decides to wipe it out in the process).

The solution?  Well, there’s not really one.  You could, on each load, check the disk space via the ‘df’ command in Linux, but that involves executing a separate command outside of E-Blah, and some servers don’t even support it.  There’s probably even Perl modules that will check the size of the disk, but there’s always a chance that you’ll still run out of space.  E-Blah tries to protect against this by creating .bak files of the member data before writing new ones; however, this is by no means a failsafe method, and often times doesn’t work either.  The best, and most certain way to have maintain data integrity is to maintain up to date backups of your forum.  Backups can easily be restored.  Data that is wiped out is usually impossible or near impossible.

There is a nightly backup script available for E-Blah that can be run as a CRON job.

Finally, I need to make it known that as of yet I’ve yet to see a case where data was over written due to a non-server related issue.  If you’re on shared hosting and not dedicated, you should always backup your forum regularly.  I can’t stress that enough.  If you suffer data loss and haven’t a backup, it’s your own fault.

Justin, I sent your message to the website hosting company. They assured me that I am using around 30GB a month of B/W and I have unlimited diskspace. Here is what they have said:

Thanks for the ticket. We have had a couple of reports from other customers regarding this which was dealt by my colleagues but couldn't find any reason how we could of caused the removal of members.

The problem isn't uncommon either as they themselves admit.

"First things first: you aren’t alone. Second thing: it has nothing to do with E-Blah.

I feel I have to explain this each week to people now"

By the sound of things there have been plenty of people reporting this. In the past there had been a thread on the Support Forums section of the EBlah website about this where the author had admitted that he had been contacted by hundreds of people every week but was denying it had anything to do with the software.

I can't find that thread now, maybe it has been replaced by the post in your ticket.

I can confirm that it isn't a issue with web space as we have plenty of it. And it's strange how they have many people contact them regarding this. And surely all these people would use a different host!?

There has been one instance when Oscommerce had dropped tables itself when it ran a certain code path. This was fixed by the authors who released a patch and it's possible something similar is happening with Eblah.

If we're able to replicate the deleting of the members we may be able to say to Eblah this is the reason why but we've not been able to do this as there has only been a couple of reports to us about it.

At the moment we are certain that the servers are not causing this.

Can you please advise?

Regards,

Jason.

Great response.  

The 10.0 release, which was quickly patched, had an issue with members being deleted.  It has been patched, and hasn't been an issue since then.

Out of the number of people who use E-Blah, it has only occurred to a small fraction of people.  The only time I ever had the issue myself was because my account ran out of space while backing my site.  It's an issue with Perl, in that it doesn't check to see if it has the space to write files before it attempts to write them.  If there is no space, the files are zeroed out.  It doesn't happen just to E-Blah, as I've saw attempted fixes elsewhere for other software with flat file databases.

I've only saw a small handful of hosts that admit it was there fault.  Of those ones who do not admit it, sometimes they fix it let the users know it.

I'll PM you something more ...

There may be a problem with the current writing of .dat files (which were backed up before being written to in order attempt to help users who have no space -- which doesn't work, and seems to have caused more issues).

Here it is, if you are having ANY of these issues upload this over the Load.pl file located in your Code directory.

** Thanks goes to thelonerider to finding this.  The issue completely removes the .dat file (it will disappear).  If the .dat file is 0 bytes, then this won't help you any.

I had this issue last night - where basically anyone on the forum, or trying to access the forum were zeroed out.

Logged it with my webhost who basically quoted this thread back to me and then said because i hadn't installed the software using their installer they would not be able to support me anymore!! The fact that i did install it using their installer over a year ago seems to have passed them by.

Quoted Text

The eBlah installer was upgraded yesterday, so unless you had upgraded since yesterday then you would still be using this original eBlah install.

I found that sometimes eBlah just 'does this' when it's running out of space... http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1168645694/ - Here is a direct quote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The solution? Well, there’s not really one. You could, on each load, check the disk space via the ‘df’ command in Linux, but that involves executing a separate command outside of E-Blah, and some servers don’t even support it. There’s probably even Perl modules that will check the size of the disk, but there’s always a chance that you’ll still run out of space. E-Blah tries to protect against this by creating .bak files of the member data before writing new ones; however, this is by no means a failsafe method, and often times doesn’t work either. The best, and most certain way to have maintain data integrity is to maintain up to date backups of your forum. Backups can easily be restored. Data that is wiped out is usually impossible or near impossible.

There is a nightly backup script available for E-Blah that can be run as a CRON job.

Finally, I need to make it known that as of yet I’ve yet to see a case where data was over written due to a non-server related issue. If you’re on shared hosting and not dedicated, you should always backup your forum regularly. I can’t stress that enough. If you suffer data loss and haven’t a backup, it’s your own fault.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've also noticed that a lot of your folders are set to 777 permissions - try setting them to 711 and see if that makes a difference.

I have been reliably informed by our Sys Admin that this isn't one of our Blah installs, in other words it was not installed from your control panel, So, unfortunately, we can't offer any further assistance.

Like I said at the beginning of this response our eBlah has just been upgraded so you could always perform a re-install from your control panel. However before doing this please backup all your files and ensure that the current installation is completely deleted before attempting a fresh install.

I guess i just have to keep backing up the fourm and keep my fingers crossed?

I am usng the latest version (06.03.07 nightly)

that's pretty much what they said. i'm not planning on doing a new, clean install though.... seems to be behaving for now  

It could be because you were using the mod_rewrite mod (that they think you didn't use their installer).  I'm not sure.  You're hosted with Heart, right?  They've always been helpful to everyone running E-Blah.  I think they did upgrade their installer or something, like they said though as I've seen different directory structures recently.

What issue did you have though?  What version when this happened?

yes - i'm with heart.

i was using the nightly from the 2nd upgraded to the 6th last night. i had a complete mare. basically anyone that was logged in was disappearing, and if i copied the backup dat up - it zeroed out straight away. the scrolling text news.txt and clicklog txt files zeroed out too.

i've been keeping an eye out, but it hasn't happened since late last night. keeping my fingers crossed.

It could have been temporary.  Note that it's not ALWAYS a space issue, sometimes it can be network issues when the drives are networked (I think Heart does this).  If things other than member files were going, it's definitely a server-sided issue.

well it gives my forum nutcases something to panic about

Gone thorugh the msgs .
I am using the latest eblah 10.2.5 forum and it up to date .Yesterday one of my old member automatically being deleted .I dont want to heppen it again and it will create bad impression among members .what should I do to make sure it will not happen again.

Hello
Today as admin I was deleted from the forum when  I refresh a post I have done .. Got a msg you are not allowed ..and after that when I tried to log in ,I was out from the forum ....
I am confused .. what to do ???

Who is your host?  They/you may be out of space.

I Read your earlier postings ,its not a case of space I have enough space on the server

Data Transfer I have used oNLY 277 of 50000 MB

Web Space     I have 10000 MB of web space. Used only below 300 mb

I am hosting with Heartinternet