Once you have more or less finished your system configuration, the majority of your time will be spent maintaining your system. You will need to answer questions and comments left to the SysOp, pack your message base and user files, back-up your system in case of data loss, etc. The following section describes various examples of maintaining your system.

If your bulletin board system encourages file transfers, you will most likely have a lot of uploads to your system. You may want to use PCBFiler on a regular basis to move the files in the upload directories to one of the file directories you have defined. By regularly moving the new files out of the upload directories, it will be easier for your users to find the files they are looking for.

PCBoard uses two system log files to record activity on the system.

The caller log files record items of interest that occur while a user was logged into the system. The time the user logged in and logged out is recorded. In addition, events such as joining a conference, transferring a file, and entering a message are also recorded. If a user tries to access a command that is not available to them, it is also recorded in the log file to help keep you informed of possible breeches in security.

The DOWNLOAD.TXT file stores information about every transfer (both uploads and downloads) on the system. Each line in this file stores the name of the file, the user who transferred the file, transfer speed, size of the file, and number of errors.

If you do not delete or archive these log files frequently you may find that your drive space is being eaten up unnecessarily. On a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, you may want to delete or archive these log files in one of your events.

Both your USERS file and your message bases should be packed on a regular basis to help ensure data integrity and also to physically remove any unwanted entries or those which have been marked for deletion.

You can pack in interactive mode by loading System Manager and selecting Users File Maintenance. However, most SysOps elect to pack the users file during a daily event instead. System Manager provides command line parameters that you can specify to pack the USERS file. For example, to simply pack the file and ensure data integrity you may issue the following command:

PCBSM /PACK

You may choose to pack-out or delete any user which has not called the system within the last 90 days. In this case, you would issue the following command:

PCBSM /PACK;DAYS:90

For more information on the command line parameters for System Manager see the Command Line Parameters section in the System Manager chapter of this manual.

If you have a lot of conferences on your system, you probably also have a lot of active message bases. In that case, it becomes essential that you pack the message bases down on a regular basis to prevent your message bases from taking too much space. Like the USERS file, most SysOps elect to pack the message bases in the events. You must use a program called PCBPack to pack your message bases – this program is included with your purchase of PCBoard.

To help keep the size of your message bases down, you can choose to pack all of your message bases so that no message base contains more than 500 messages. This is very easy to accomplish by entering the following:

PCBPACK /AREA:ALL /MAXMSGS:500

You may choose to pack only messages older than 45 days by entering the following command:

PCBPACK /AREA:ALL /DAYS:45

PCBPack has several other options available as well. See the Utilities chapter of this manual for additional details.

Most bulletin board systems will contain several megabytes or gigabytes of data. Therefore, it always wise to have some sort of backup system in place so you can regularly back up your system in case of data loss, hardware failure, etc.

While you do not have to back up your system every day, it certainly would be a good idea to do a backup every other day, or perhaps once a week. Sooner or later, you will probably experience some sort of data loss where you need to access a backup to restore files.