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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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