Forum-BackUp

[JoeWho]

Forum-BackUp:

I have spent the last couple of days searching the messages about backups and I'm not any closer to finding an answer then when I started. Many of the messages posted are way out of date and can be a little confusing to say the least.

I am not a coder although I do manage to get through most hacks and plug-ins without a great deal of problem and I can work through telnet and build a cron batch file, so if anybody has a solution it would be a great help to make it clear for a beginner/idiot/newbie, etc. to use.

There is numerous ways of backing up a forum, what I'm looking for is a tried and true backup, is there such a thing?
I would like to run my backup nightly and I would also like to run it from cron batch file.
My current backup is about 60 meg, as my forum grows I'm sure the backup will get larger, but for the time being I would like to back it up daily/nightly with a daily name, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., so I will have a seven-day backup. This should be able to overwrite the existing backup file Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., but a backup is only good if I can be successively restored. I see many posts about MySQL-dump, etc. but have these been successively restored and what is the commands/methods used to restore?

I have a test server that I have tried to restore my backup to without much luck so far, this is something I need to have working before I need it... how many people have successfully restored their back, how many have even tried to make sure it works?

Maybe this is too much to ask for... I'm just hoping somebody out there has a tried and true proven method for backups?

If nobody has a tried and true proven method... than I will keep at it until I find one and I will post it here for others. I just hate to reinvent the wheel if it's already been done.

My forum Info:
vbulletin_3-5-4
vBadvanced CMPS_2.1.0
Server Type FreeBSD
Data Usage 38.22 MB
Web Server Apache v2.0.52
Index Usage 6.23 MB
PHP 5.0.3 Attachment Usage 7.81
PHP Max Post Size 8.00 MB
Avatar Usage 97.4 KB
PHP Maximum Upload Size 2.00 MB
Profile Picture Usage 53.9
PHP Memory Limit None
MySQL Version 4.0.21
MySQL Packet Size 16.00 MB

Thanks for any and all help...