How is a website's data stored?

I assume it is on a server. Does it only have 1 copy? So let's say if the server's building burns down, the whole info gets lost? Or do they back up website data as well?

Let's say in the case of Sciforums. The server is in Toronto. Is the data exists somewhere else too?

I assume servers are large hardrives, is that correct? Is it possible to give a virus to a server to shipe out all the data?

OK, in short, what does one have to do if one wants to whipe out all old memories, threads of a message board?

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death takes of it all

 

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A websites data is usually stored in a database or array within a file. It's impossible to say which one, since every website is different, running on different operating systems while running different CGI interpreter languages and accessing different databases.

It's up to the site operator to decide on what formats to use and whether they backup their data.

The servers in question usually are a mixture of main system with a bunch running as cache's, where replicated data is distributed across network accesses to lower the servers overall load. Simply if you ran a home computer over an internet connection as a server, you'd find it grinding to a halt should you actually have large amounts of internet traffic, since your bandwidth would be split between all accesses.

Is it possible to get a virus to ship out all the data? Well you probably could if you managed to find a system that wasn't running the most up to date things and understood how to exploit all the exploits, however you'd probably get caught pretty quickly considering the amount of data and accesses necessary to copy a database. (Not forgetting the tracible logs)

As for wiping out old memories/threads on a message board, there isn't much you can do. If you have written posts and they are preportion to a thread then your posts have to remain to keep the thread in a kind of readible order, otherwise none of the threads conversations would make any sense.

 

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Depends on the scale of the web site. A simple message board like sciforums could be run on one quite low powered server. The posts will be held in some sort of database, and that database either backed up to tape, or exported to flat file and copied elsewhere. A larger web site may have more than one database server behind it, perhaps running Oracle, or MS SQL Server. Usually then the architecture will be three tier, 1, Web Server, 2, Apps server, 3, Database Server, with full corporate data protection running on each layer (ie full, and incremental backups of all data and OS, and AV)

Probably not, unless Porfiry takes offsite backups. The 'wayback machine' and the Google cache probably have most of it, but not in a format that could be used to recreate the database.

Copy it, or delete it? Delete, spossibly, but all the systems I have worked with are well firewalled off apart from necessary ports and run AV. All also have full backup systems, so wouldn't be down for long. Large harddrive, maybe, maybe not. As the data in a forum is simply text, it doesn't take much space to store, so a few tens of Gb is probably more than enough for places like sciforums.

Buy the site. Delete the forum database, destroy all backups, and try and get Google to wipe your site from their cache. Good luck with the latter.