# Is it possible to know size of this site in terms of bytes?



## Jeff Jacobs

Is it possible to know size of this site in terms of bytes? I mean referring to memory data.


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## mkellogg

The whole site or just the forums? Or maybe the just post content?

Let's just say it is quite a few GB. The posts themselves currently:
10.4 GB
16.2 million posts
6.3 billion characters for the text of the posts themselves (in UTF-8 encoding, each character can be more than one byte)

I see that the 2nd edition of the OED had 350 million characters in 20 volumes. While the forums are different, the text here is currently about 15x the size of the OED. (My count includes spaces, theirs does not.) I estimate that it would be 335,000 pages over 300 volumes if printed like the OED. Not bad.


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## Jeff Jacobs

mkellogg said:


> The wh....00 volumes if printed like the OED. Not bad.



What happen to my thread if it met bad sector of this site's storage server?


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## mkellogg

We do keep backups, so I would restore the latest backup. As for a specific bad sector, that would be pretty rare. Everything is written to two disks immediately, so both disks would have to fail in the exact same sector at the same time. That is extremely rare. The bigger problem is if the entire server fails. Then we need to get a backup that isn't on the server, but we are ready for that, too!


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## Jeff Jacobs

What happen to my thread if it met bad sector of this site's storage server? So no answer for this?


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## mkellogg

Jeff Jacobs said:


> What happen to my thread if it met bad sector of this site's storage server? So no answer for this?


I did answer that question. There is no problem. Actually, within two seconds of you hitting Enter on your keyboard, your message is saved to 12 hard disks across a number of servers on two continents. A disk failure of any kind including a bad sector on one of the disks will not cause the loss of your post or thread.


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## Jeff Jacobs

mkellogg said:


> I did .....ead.


suppose 12 hard disks got  bad sector at same spot on my thread, then how does my thread look this?


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## Peterdg

Jeff Jacobs said:


> suppose 12 hard disks got bad sector at same spot on my thread


The chances of that happening are zero (says a guy that has been working as a systems engineer in IT for over 40 years).


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