I was thinking it would be cool if there was a hack that would automatically backup your forums on the server at a specified interval

I haven't found this hack so far, but if it exists, don't yell at me

So what do you guys think?

If you are on a *nix box you just need to set up a cron job or two. My board backs up every 12 hours automatically. I just set up two cron jobs to run the appropriate mysqldump.

how do i set up the cron job?

i have the feature on my server, yet i don't know how to use it. hehe

help? :confused: :confused: :confused:

heh. thanks

anyone? :stupid:

If you enter:

0 0 * * * mysqldump --opt -udatabaseusername -pdatabasepassword databasename > /path/toyour/backupdirectory/backup.sql

It will backup your database at midnight every day. Obviously, you have to replace databaseusername, databasepassword, and the path with your values. Change the second 0 if you want to change the hour. It's 24 hour time. :)

thanks :)

No problem. :)

does anyone know why - when using the admin page resulting output is 23 meg while using above cron method its 13 meg.

Is it because something needs to adjusted in my config or is vbulletins admin page doing the backup in a different way.

If i remember correctly the vBulletin adds alot of comments in the sql output and some whitespace, not sure if this can accomodate for 10mb though, there is usually only a couple 100kb difference.

Are you selecting all the tables in the admin panel?

Yes - all options are at yes.

I also assume that the difference is that the sqldump command simply takes the complete database - while the vbulletin php script does it category by category.

Still a bit puzzling though.

Just redid it to verify and result is exactly like that. The database is 200 users and 12000 posts with a few custom avatars.

I don't know enough about the innards to know if it is a cause for worry. Guess I will have to do a parallel installation and restore it to see.