[Marco van Herwaarden]

Most of our users will install vBulletin themself, even those without experience in installing webbased software. We do offer a Professional Installation Service ($150.00) but we mostly encouraged users to install on their own. This will make the user more knowledgable and will make it easier in the future for the user. If needed you can always rely on our support ticket system to help solve any issues that you might encounter during the installation (or the use of vBulletin). You always have the option to purchase the instalation service at a later time or hire a third party to perform the installation for you.

Originally Posted by FearlessWeeder

Regarding the unavailability of a built-in reliable backup option for vBulletin, thank you for your candor Marco van Herwaarden. I personally would not have appreciated learning about vBulletin's deficiency after there was a problem. Let's discuss third party utilities please. Are there threads here where they are identified and discussed? If not, would those reading this thread be so kind as to provide me with the names of these products and a brief synopsis of how they could work for me? I'm not necessarily looking for a hand out so if there is a third party application out there that is superior for backing up that isn't free, I'd most probably be amenable to paying for it.

Not having a decent backup option inside vBulletin itself is not so much of a deficiency, but more a choice. Any webbased backup solution is prone to problems like timeouts during the backup. Non webbased solutions are often operating system dependant and thus less usefull in generic software. Also most host already offer backup services and the database software (MySQL) also comes with backup tooling for the database (the most important part of your backup).

You can read more about manual backups in our manual: Backing-up your MySQL Database Manually