Backing Up your VB Site ~ Nah Never!!

[UKBusinessLive]

Hi Guys,

This thread is just to raise awareness on the importance of regulary backing up your forums, and perhaps doing a full back up at server level.

All you need to do is to read the amount of horror stories on here of people that have lost their site due to not having backups or their host not doing auto backups of their site.

Its one of those things, Like planning your funeral, that we never do until its too late!!, So guys today its Sunday, your not that busy, why don't we all back up our sites and add a post here to say we've done it!! ;)

Take part in the poll and be honest, your not kidding anyone apart from yourselves!! You can tick Multi, so be honest and if you don't know how to do backups then todays the day that your gonna find out. Its not as hard as it looks and it could save your forum!

If you have a problem knowing what or where to back up post here and we'll help each other out.

Heres a quick Tutorial on Backing up your all your webspace using Cpanel http://www.cpanel.net/media/tutorials/backup.htm

Today I've declared this Sunday as National VBulletin Back up day :D

[motowebmaster]

Where are the positive answers? Some of us backup several times per day.

[Theater]

I laughed when I read this thread title. *shakes head @ UKBL* Anyway, yes, backup your site yourself even if you're using a managed hosting solution. Demand access if you have to. It will save you a headache in the future should your site ever crash and burn. I am learning the hard way today with restoring my own community with a dated 2 month old backup. At least I have that much.

[HMBeaty]

I usually make a backup at the LEAST, every few days. Better to always be safe than sorry

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Also, just a suggestion for everyone on here, I use, probably always will use, Paul M's vB Database Backup (Lite) (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=201319) to constantly make a backup of my database. Usually have it run every few days

[Biker_GA]

Every other day as a minimum.. Last backup was last night.

[UKBusinessLive]

I laughed when I read this thread title. *shakes head @ UKBL* Anyway, yes, backup your site yourself even if you're using a managed hosting solution. Demand access if you have to. It will save you a headache in the future should your site ever crash and burn. I am learning the hard way today with restoring my own community with a dated 2 month old backup. At least I have that much.

Lol Sorry Buddy its nothing personal, but all you need to do is read of the horror stories here nearly every week, guys with 20,000+ members losing their whole site, just because they didn't do a simple backup, alot of folk also think that their hosts do auto back ups, Think again, the responsibilty is yours as a forum owner to back up often, time period depends on how big you are but in general the larger site you are the more backups you should be doing.

I guess theres loads of members that have never done a backup, perhaps they don't know, well post here Guys and we'll help you get your Backup created, Don't be shy, we're doing this for the common good.



:D

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I usually make a backup at the LEAST, every few days. Better to always be safe than sorry

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Also, just a suggestion for everyone on here, I use, probably always will use, Paul M's vB Database Backup (Lite) (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=201319) to constantly make a backup of my database. Usually have it run every few days

Excellent Choice and easy to use too!

don't forget to save your backups too, you can save them on a memory stick or CD, but lately i've been sending them to my email account at google, Excellent to storage ;)

[Angel-Wings]

No need for manual backups - everything is mirrored in realtime at a 2nd machine and there compressed every 12 hours, kept for 7 days then the oldest files are renamed to the week, after 4 weekly backups the oldest renamed to the month so I've monthly, weekly and daily backups + the realtime ones.

[Lynne]

I backup our database everynight and rsync all our files (including all attachments/avatars/torrents/etc) to a remote server every night. I also make a zipped backup of all those files once a week (separately! The attachments are over 10 GB!) and rsync them to that remote server. I also have copies of all the vb files on my mac.

[iogames]

I backup every time I made major changes

[dabollicks]

I back mine up everyday, have been one of those horror stories, so dont intend on losing everything again

[Brandon Sheley]

I vote for *I make a backup every day*

[Davros]

Every 12 hours me and a Co. Admin take it in turns.

[digicom]

Every Day I Create A Backup

[maddento]

Yea im hurting from doing a back up 7 days ago. I couldn;t imagine not ever doing one. Talking about being screwed!!!!!!!!!

backup FTW

[SECTalk.com]

I've got a cron job which makes daily back ups but only of the database. I would like some info on backing up the files.

[TheLastSuperman]

Once a week and yes before I did it once a week it did bite me in the arse :(

PLEASE do backups, please for your sanity, read this thread, ignore it and justify not doing it all day long thinking your safe OR even not doing it because you won't take the time to learn but at some point it will return to haunt you like a ghost in the night :p.

ALWAYS! And I do it before mod installs, if you become familiar with it it can take less than 1-5 mins depending on board size/method of backup (this can be higher but in general).

Please!!!!!!

[josefebus]

Thanks for the link to the Auto Backup mod...Now I backup every day!

[steven s]

I wonder how many people backup to their own server?

[Lynne]

I wonder how many people backup to their own server?
Baby steps... :)

Usually backing up to your own server is sufficient. However, it really is best to keep a copy of that backup on a remote server.

[UKBusinessLive]

Once a week and yes before I did it once a week it did bite me in the arse :(

PLEASE do backups, please for your sanity, read this thread, ignore it and justify not doing it all day long thinking your safe OR even not doing it because you won't take the time to learn but at some point it will return to haunt you like a ghost in the night :p.

ALWAYS! And I do it before mod installs, if you become familiar with it it can take less than 1-5 mins depending on board size/method of backup (this can be higher but in general).

Please!!!!!!

Words of Wisdom Mike,

Its really so easy to do full server backups, see video in first post, even if you have someone else do back ups, what would happen if they told you, their system was down when yours crashes, or gets damaged? For the sake of 5 mins or less of your time, can you keep taking that risk??

Like Lynne Says "Baby Steps"

I download mine and save it to my memory stick, but i also send myself an email (Google) with it as an attachment, so not only do i have one for easy restoring on my stick but one saved on googles own servers too!!

[calumn]

My whole server including the operating system, all settings, databases and files are backed up through bqbackup every night - its only $5 a month and not much bandwidth (you would expect many Gb since its the whole OS etc.) since it only backs up what has changed.

[Shamil.]

My cron job backs up the cPanel account and dumps it every 3 hours :)

[musado1961]

Database is backed up daily & file structure weekly.

[Paul M]

Ive added a Daily (or more often) option, since thats what I do (and a few others from reading this thread).

[forum4]

My hosting co says they do a daily backup, so I hadn't done one till tonight when I got miffed at them.

I did a full backup from cpanel to my desktop. Cpanel said something about not being able to do a restore with those files, but I guess they can be used to start over.

[UKBusinessLive]

My hosting co says they do a daily backup, so I hadn't done one till tonight when I got miffed at them.

I did a full backup from cpanel to my desktop. Cpanel said something about not being able to do a restore with those files, but I guess they can be used to start over.



If you want to restore a site from a cpanel backup, with the associated databases email addresses, etc.., you need to have a "Full" backup from cpanel and restore that backup using the restore a ' Full Backup/cpmove File' in WHM.

If you restore a "home" backup from within cpanel you will not get the mysql databases, email addresses, mailing lists, subdomains, and addon domains.

If the account you want to restore is located on another server you can also use the transfer feature. Which basically creates a full backup, transfers the backup to new server and performs a restore.

Hope this helps ;)

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Ive added a Daily (or more often) option, since thats what I do (and a few others from reading this thread).

Thanks Paul :D

[COBRAws]

mirrored backup - 0sec

Everything is sync'ed with another server setup for backups only.

[Dismounted]

mirrored backup - 0sec

Everything is sync'ed with another server setup for backups only.
That can be a bad thing. Any corruption would be synched automatically onto the other server.

[chick]

Every 24 hours automatically starting at midnight (all sites on my server) and dropping it to my 2nd drive.

[cheat-master30]

A few days ago was the last time I made a backup of my forum. It's one of those things that I semi rarely actually get the chance to do, but I usually do so before a major change (major modification, major vBulletin release).

[Lautaro]

I voted for *Daily (or more often)*
I've installed an automatic backup mod and it set up the cron job to do it every day, I don't remember very well who was the coder of this mod..

And right now I'm looking for a FTP backup maker to install it in a dedicated server I have so I have all my data secured.

[mac-warez]

The only time i make "File system Backups" is when i alter the files themselves or update vBulletin.

I take daily MYSQL backups through SSH and download to my computer. You should never store backups on your server it self. Because if a hacker gains entry into your server they automatically have an SQL dump to release to other sites. I also encode my Config.php with IONCUBE so if a hacker gets into my FTP all they can do is delete files and not access my SQL databases.

[COBRAws]

That can be a bad thing. Any corruption would be synched automatically onto the other server.
That's right, but the backups are incremental and by timestamp as well (so that makes 3 types of backup in total), and all software installed and DB's are being monitored by a 3rd company contracted to make sure everything runs smoothly. Shit can happen at any given time no matter what backup system or method has been deployed.

[ShadowStalker]

I have been doing the backup via cPanel, probably every few days. If all I am doing is a home directory backup and a mysql database backup, will I be able to restore those and have my whole site back up and running?

[kursed]

Daily, weekly and monthly backups of the database, which get rsync'd to a remote server. And weekly backups of the cpanel, which then gets rsync'd to the remote server as well.

[stardotstar]

I run a cron hourly which dumps the databases to a db_latest.sql which overwrites the previous hour and therefore is a reasonably stable disk usage.
Then in the wee hours I do a time stamped daily dump with cron, compress the set of latest hourly's and dailys with bzip then rsync them off to another server.
I also have a weekly web tree/ft tree and home tree compression that rsyncs out over a staggered period of time.

The crons for the processes are also staggered and set to background and not interfere with the boards (especially important for the hourly) I have not perfected this from a performance point of view but my server is dedicated hardware so I have that luxury I guess.

I have felt the panic of not having a backup and finding myself up to the armpits in the guts of my db fixing something that shouldn't have gone wrong but did!
Now I backup as described and always do nontrivial mods on a dev board first.

[josh2007]

lol i backup our site about every 4-5 days better than nothing i guess. Our site dont get that much visits or members to worry much about crashing

[Vangy]

ok someone hit me with a naughty stick....

I have no idea how to back up
I used to pay my webmaster to do it before installs or upgrades but I actually have no clue how to do it myself, Im grateful for this thread but how on earth do i find out what my

back up destination?
my remote server?
remote user?
remote password?
port?
and forum directory

are, I have no idea what these are where or how i find the information like this to even begin to impliment my own backups

do i type in whats in the tutorial link given in the first thread the same all except my email?? Im confused please help

I'd be happy to pay for someone to teach me how to do this safely.

[mmoore5553]

I actually run alot of forums and i found a nice free program and wanted to share it ... and i backup them all daily ..database or free site. it has saved me before

it is called

cpsitesaver

they do not support it anymore but there is nothing really to support. It runs off cpanel and does a backup of db to your pc . i have used it for years ... .

just another freebie that works.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

I always use rsnapshot to backup daily (could also do it hourly is needed) to a seperate drive.

[Xencored]

I backup our database everynight and rsync all our files (including all attachments/avatars/torrents/etc) to a remote server every night. I also make a zipped backup of all those files once a week (separately! The attachments are over 10 GB!) and rsync them to that remote server. I also have copies of all the vb files on my mac.

Holyshit sticks
thats a hell of alot

I backup now and again should do it more tho :erm:

[deadlySniper]

I backup twice a week.

[Wabuf]

I backup my forums at least twice a week to my desktop. Otherwise my forums are backed up from my primary server to my alternative location off site daily.

[Zahl]

I'm also using rsync.

At 5am a mysqldump gets created and bzip2 compressed, and at 5:30am rsync runs and
syncs the DB backup aswell as the whole htdocs dir to a seperate server that I have just for
this purpose, nothing else. Never needed the backups though, luckily.
But I guess the day I would disable the backup scripts my DB would crash.

[R-D]

I have mysqldumper email me database backups every 2 hours. It does a great job of making a 100+MB backup far smaller (about 20MB currently), plus I never have to worry about backing up my db manually.

As for files, I back them up and download 'em every day or so.

[knucklenitz]

I am using mysqldumper to email mysql backups once per night. It looks like I was ignorant to the fact that that didn't back up ALL of the required info.

I just now ran a manual 'full' back up in my host cPanel and saved it to my machine. I am checking with my host to find out how to set up a cron job to do a full back up and then FTP it to my offsite system. Or does someone here have a good/better method, gui based and preferably not code based? Thanks!!

[matt4]

I run a cron as most of the people above do. Does the job good :)

[TNCclubman]

Ive tried backing up my database by going into phpmyadmin and it stops at 10MB (kind of just freezes there)

any ideas?

(database is around 400MB)

[Marco van Herwaarden]

The only reliable method of backing up and restoring a database is with shell access via telnet or ssh. This is because backing up with a PHP script like that in the Admin CP or phpMyAdmin can result in PHP timeouts errors and an incomplete backup file. Please see the instructions here:

Backup:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/maintenance_ssh_backup

Restore:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/maintenance_ssh_restore

P.S. If you don't have shell access, some people have also reported success with these scripts:

MySQLDumper:
http://www.mysqldumper.de/en/index.php

MySQLHotxcopy:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134821&highlight=mysqlhotcopy

Bigdump:
http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

[icarusforde]

Every coupl'a days. Needs to happen a little more often, i guess.

Tis being worked on. I might have to get one of the cron jobs going.

[edytwinky]

Even after reading this thread i've been seriously slacking. Once a month. I need like a self reminder to do this more often.

File structure and database