Whats the best way to do backups?

[David Lama]

???

[Zachery]

Depends on what access you have :P a nicely written cron script to backup files and the database nightly/weekly is nice.

[David Lama]

i keep hearing that the backups from admincp with the vbulletin software arent safe and are usually corrupted. but for some reason i trust them more. when i do a backup from my hosts cpanel it doesnt feel complete and it always comes out as a smaller sized file than the one i do with the vbulletin admincp.

and i have no idea how to work with cron, never have touched it yet =/

[Zachery]

They are not safe because of timeouts, and they are not corrupted but rather just not finished depending on sizes.


The backups from cpanel are complete, they do a full mysqldump and then gzip it to be smaller.

[David Lama]

thanks zach!!!

how can i be sure if there was a timeout or not?

and by what size does the problems start coming?

[Zachery]

There is no specific size for vBulletin, I've done 500mb backups from the admincp and others haven't been able to get past 10mb. Its safer to use the cpanel backup.

[David Lama]

thanks again zach!

Originally Posted by Zachery

There is no specific size for vBulletin, I've done 500mb backups from the admincp and others haven't been able to get past 10mb. Its safer to use the cpanel backup.

but shouldnt both backups look more or less the same? the one from vb and the one from cpanel?? cause they look different. start and end differently. even the things in the middle look different. is that weird? and i know the cpanel one is zipped. but even when i unzip it and rename it a sql file it is still smaller than the vbulletin admincp one.

i just did a back up with both minutes away from each other

vbulletin admin cp backup = 62.8 MB (unzipped and renamed a sql file)

my hosts cpanel backup = 55.2 MB (SQL file)

i guess the reason i worry with the cpanel backup the most is because it isnt like the admincp one. at least the admincp backup says "
### VBULLETIN DATABASE DUMP COMPLETED ###" all the way at the bottom. the cpanel backup doesnt. is it suppose to?? if not whats suppose to be all the way at the bottom??

also in cpanel there are 3 different types of backups. aliases, filters something and then the mysql. is this why its smaller than the admincp one? is the admincp backup all 3 from the cpanel one together or something??

[Zachery]

No the AdminCP backup is not compressed at all, the cPanel backup is, thus different sizes.

[David Lama]

i know. but when uncompressed its still a different size. isnt it suppose to be the same afterwards

[Zachery]

A backup made directly from the shell is generally smaller anyway.