How often do you take backups?
 

Hii!

This backup thing is a real pain, but most important too. I understand most hosts on managed server take backups everyday but we all like to keep our own copy as well.

So I am looking for opinions/views of people regarding backing up of their forum databases. Please let me know:-

1. How often do you take backups? Is it everyday, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.

2. Do you burn the backup .sql/.gz regularly onto a CD/DVD etc or just prefer to keep it in on your hard drive.

3. Do you turn off your forum while taking backups. I have read that turning off is recommeded to maintain integrity of the backup, specially on larger forums where continous activity is going on.

4. Just before I take a backup, I first clear all my logs (cp, moderator, scheduled task log) and run an "optimize db" from admincp, only then I take a backup. Is this a good practise?

5. Anything else that needs to be taken care of, while backups?

Thanks

I take a backup of the database every night and rsync it to an offsite backup server afterwards. Every night I also rsync all our files (attachments, avatars, php files, etc.) to the offsite server. I also keep a copy of all my vb files here at home.

I have a cronjob running that removes DB backups older than 7 days, then creates a DB backup, and rsync's it off to another server. This runs every night. Files are backed up on Wednesdays and Sundays. The cronjobs also run a PHP script which turns the forum off while doing this.

How do we rsync databases to an offsite backup server? Is there some tool/program to do this? Which one do you use?

Does files also require rsync? How much time does the whole process take each day, say on a 150MB database and 1gb files.

Thanks

For my db, I use the script at vb.com here, and use an FTP batch file to automatically download it daily. Once at home, I keep copies of my backups folder on alternate hard drives - one being taken off premises monthly.

For my home directory, I use cpanel once a month. Again, downloading the whole thing to my backups/ folder.

rsync is a way to transfer files: http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/

oh okay. thanks for the link! So with rsync, the differences in the files (if any changed, or new added, or removed) are saved to another server, and not the whole data everytime, is that correct?

Does rsync works for database backup files too, like .sql or .gz? How does it save the differences?

Do you also test your database backups sometimes, if it is working fine or not. How often?

--------------- Added [DATE]1235983436[/DATE] at [TIME]1235983436[/TIME] ---------------

this looks good. thank you videx.

Not sure what you mean by FTP batch files?? Do you mean cron jobs at cpanel? How do we schedule a cron if we don't use any panels. And after backups being downloaded into backups/ folder, do you download it daily onto your hard-disk? Is there an automated system for that too lol? How much time does it normally take?

Thanks..

Optimising has no influence on the backup (or the size of the backup). Also you should not be running any maintenance on the database unless it is needed. Maintenance routines can not only optimise or repair a database, it can also do damage.

I backup once a week with mysqldumper. My database is about 400 MB in gz format. And I changed server 4 times till today using these backups.. No problem at all..

daily dbase backups and full site backups mon wed fri and sat, offsite full backup once a week.

DB backups are made in realtime to a backup server, there a dump is created every 12 hours, compressed awaiting download or rsync.

A small home server connects once a day to the backup DB to sync everything and uses rsync to download modified or new files.
These modified files are kept in a directory so I've still the original installation, modified files of the last half year / one month / 1 up to 7 days in case I need them.

In a worst case backups are 12 hours old.

I use the mod that creates a backup once a day, and I transfer those on to the HD every few days
I do have a few older CD's with a DB on them, but they are pretty old.