I second this idea....my database is growing like a beast. Just 35MB's w/out the attachment table and 200MB with it. It is now growing at 2MB-4MB per day! The option to break off attachments would be great. I am working on a backup that will save all tables minus attachments and uneccesary index tables that can be rebuilt if needed. Downside is if disaster strikes all attachments are gonzo.

Thanks for the hack.

It was fairly painless to install and works great!

We're a little bit confused :S So it finally can just do a backup of the attachments withour removing them from the database, just so we can have the binaries from the DB?

Thx for your hard work, PPN :)

once you have imported the attachments to files you can simply drop the filedata column and this will reduce your attachments table to kb instead of mb. Though you will have to remember to backup the attachments folder on your server every once and a while. I simply gzip it then download it to another server, cause then i get about 2mbps.
With database backups you still need to include the attachments table as this holds the file hashes and other stuff, just it won't be so large.

Uhm... that's not what we mean. We'll try again :)

At this moment, what we want to do is just to have our attachments as binaries in another folder, without changing anything to the way vB stores attachments and without removing them from the DB. Just like a big backup of all the attachments.

Hope you understand us now :__ )

hmm i guess i'll do this and release it as a hack, would be kinda useful will be back in about 15mins with this done :D

Hi, I am trying to import my files but I get the following error:

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle in ../attachment_install.php on line 333.

I am running vBulletin 2.2.0. Thanks!

did you set the attachment path in the settings part of the control panel, chmod the folder to 666 and check that the script user is the same as the folder, ie. same linux user.

Yes, I set all of those however I remember trying out this hack originally when it first came out in beta. For some reason I have two file path fields in the admin options section. Could that be causing the problem? When I tried it out today, I put both fields with the correct path just to be sure.

Nice one, thanks!