[MikeF]

Originally Posted by Lynne

Could be the the author asked to have it removed... could be a copyright issue... either way, we are not at liberty to make it available again.

Hello, Lynne. Yes, I was just politely asking if someone may have known or wished to look into the matter. I found it unusual that something so basic would have been moved to the graveyard.

You should ALWAYS keep copies of ALL your modifications in several places (on your computer, on your site, on your backup site, on your computer backup, etc.)

We keep daily, monthly, and weekly backups, as well as additional nightly, full database backups on a dedicated backup drive which also connects to Dropbox. These backups are performed by 2 Intel Xeon processors running with 8 cores and 24GB of DDR EEC RAM on solid state technology. This allows for full redundancy, but we seldom keep XML files on backup due to their perceived availability. It was just tonight that a clean-up of products and plugins was in affect for the first time in awhile, and it was found that this mod had been deleted.

Thank you for your reply. There are many other packages that use Yahoo emoticons, so I found it unusual. I had inquired with the author, but did not receive a reply and doubt I will here, either. This is especially true if the author wanted it taken down. This is a fine explanation for other people who have future problems.

As I expressed in the OP, it is very possible to bring back the XML file, but it would involve, as BirdOPrey5 rightfully concluded, setting up a second install to extract that file. This is because we do not maintain backups of XML products but instead keep entire database and filesystem backups. These backups allow for quick restoration of critical files and the entire database itself in the event of a disaster. Their connection to the Dropbox service allows for secure storage through the Amazon Elastic Compute cloud.

To fix this problem, 90+ new descriptors to these images. While the smilie files themselves are easy to access, restoring an entire database takes an enormous amount of time. I am happy to respond to this message, however, and explain once again why restoring the product from a backup is not as simple. We do not waste space since we know the products are already exportable from vBulletin database backups.

Thank you for making your backup recommendations. Vbulletin.org often sends notifications when products are updated by the author, or when there is a status change, but I am confident that this does not happen when the item is moved to the graveyard. The process of restoring a backup to get 90 smilies emoticons is a time sink, so it was fine to just add new associations to those image files. It is unfortunate to see that this modification will no longer be available for others to use, for whatever reason, and no notification was sent to those who had installed it.

The technique BirdOPrey5 recommended is the one that is always used and recommended to other administrators on my website in this situation. This is why the XML files are not placed anywhere a backup would occur. They are already in a database backup. As you can see, time was the issue here.

Kind Regards,
Michael