How to make a backup of my forums?
 

I have a somewhat large database and when I use my control panel to make vbulletin database backups, it takes hours and hours and while its in the process, no one can access the forums, is their a better way of making this backup or is this normal?

There is alot of different ways to backup your DB personally i using this app to do it http://www.richtsoft.com DumpTimer i think its the best solution for large databases yo can config the app to backup your db everyday its comressed and you can easly restore one of the backups :D

Downloaded that a little while ago and it doesn't seem to be working right for me. It'll get almost completed then towards the end have a timeout, out of memory, datestamp, and a bunch of other different errors each time it trys to finish.

Anywase, is downloading a backup with PHPMYADIM via the export tab ok? Its downloading as one SQL file, so if I were to ever loose my database, if I reuploaded that file, all my posts, images, users, etc would be reloaded without any problems?

<a href="http://fragments.turtlemeat.com/mysql-database-backup-restore-phpmyadmin.php" target="_blank">http://fragments.turtlemeat.com/mysq...phpmyadmin.php</a>

aslong as you have phpymyadmin (which you should)

PHP Admin is no good for large databases. It's limit is like 52MB and there can be timeouts. I dunno the details, it should not be relied on though.

I wrote this, How to Backup via SSH or Cron, last month. Give it a look.

my database is about 91 mb and never had it cutoff or timeout

I said there can be, not there will be. SSH/cron backups via mysql are the safest IMHO.