How often do you take backups?

[veenuisthebest]

Hii!

This backup thing is a real pain, but most important too. I understand most hosts on managed server take backups everyday but we all like to keep our own copy as well.

So I am looking for opinions/views of people regarding backing up of their forum databases. Please let me know:-

1. How often do you take backups? Is it everyday, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.

2. Do you burn the backup .sql/.gz regularly onto a CD/DVD etc or just prefer to keep it in on your hard drive.

3. Do you turn off your forum while taking backups. I have read that turning off is recommeded to maintain integrity of the backup, specially on larger forums where continous activity is going on.

4. Just before I take a backup, I first clear all my logs (cp, moderator, scheduled task log) and run an "optimize db" from admincp, only then I take a backup. Is this a good practise?

5. Anything else that needs to be taken care of, while backups?

Thanks