[Nik] Obviously if you drop me a line indicating when it'll go down, I'll arrange for a backup to be made of the game data at that point. I'm away for the bank holiday weekend, but with sufficient warning can set up a cron job to do the business, so it's irrelevant really.

What are you saying, like? Don't trust me to not destroy all the data, like? Eh? Eh? A benefit of switching disks and installing fresh is that the current disk won't be modified at all during the process, so data should be safe, although I'll be dumping /etc, /home, /var and /usr to CD anyway (a slightly neater variation of which will become a weekly backup to CDRW). I might go to Apache 2 and Mysql 4; I'll have a look at their feature lists and see if it's worth the risk.

In a complete change of subject, did anyone catch last week's Just A Minute? What the hell were they saying about celebrity colonic irrigations?

[Dr Q] Which bit? "I'm A Celebrity, Get It Out Of Here"?

[Nik] Well - I didn't anticipate any loss of data but I never thought having too many backups was ever a problem! I'm using MySQL 4.0.12 here without difficulties. The main bonus is subqueries (not that I use these at the moment) but there is a slight difference in the way certain priveliges work, so you might find yourself saddled with some additional admin overhead if you were to upgrade. I know nothing of apache 2 - last I heard it was "experimental" which I understand to be a euphemism for "best avoided".