A Guitar And Gear Support Forum

A narrow-focus photo (heh) forum was down, recently, and one comment made was "PHP 5.6 has been end-of-life since ....".

I am sure it will be back up, running on a newer, more solid platform.

Now the question: how hard is it to transfer contents (posts, resources, etc.) from one platform to another?
Many forums hold a great deal of knowledge, not easily obtained otherwise. If migration is problematic and not standardized in some form via generic encoding, are we at risk of losing valuable contents in many areas?

The process is not hard if the individual(s) doing the work knows what they are doing, and if the platform was configured properly in the first placed/backed up.

This is usually the case with any technology based solution whether it be a web forum or a database/application/system at your place of work. The technology itself is just a tool, it's the people who design, utilize and maintain it that determine success or failure for the most part. Certainly there are environmental factors too ( hardware failure, security breaches, etc ) but for the most part those all can be planned for and mitigated.

It depends on the forum software, and how well the site and server are maintained,

None of this stuff is just held in one database table, nicely schema'd, it's sprayed across multiple tables, and referenced,

A mainstream software like PHPBB or vBulletin is quite reliable in terms of migration, some of the lesser used tolls much less so,