Administrative and Maintenance Tools - vBulletin Cron Based Database Backup

As of 23 Nov 2017 this modification has been withdrawn.

This is a cut down version based on a backup system written by Trigunflame for vb 3.0. It is a simple vBulletin cron trigged php system that does a dump of your database - either as one complete file, or as one file per table. Especially useful now that IB removed the old ACP backup option in vBulletin 4. Files can be (G)Zipped to save space.

All the options are located in the ACP in vBulletin Options >> vBulletin Automatic Backup

To install, download and unzip the files, and follow the instructions in the text file.


History:

v4.0.1 : 28-Dec-2009 : Initial release for vb 4.0.0 Gold.
v4.0.2 : 29-Dec-2009 : Added ability to block process larger tables.
v4.0.3 : 27-Jun-2010 : Added Gzip option.

v4.1.0 : 04-Dec-2010 : Updated for vBulletin 4.1.0.

v4.1.7.0 : 16-Oct-2011 : Updated for vBulletin 4.1.7.

v4.2.0.0 : 24-May-2012 : Updated for vBulletin 4.2.0.
v4.2.0.1 : 17-Mar-2013 : Removed vboptions from backup call..
v4.2.0.2 : 25-Nov-2013 : Fix php 5.3 deprecated warnings, added mysqldump backup.

[doogie88]

Thanks. That's exactly what I needed too! Filled my server HD after several months of backups!

[Paul M]

Its a trick covered many times in this thread, right back to 2010

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...23#post1997323

[RichieBoy67]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Its a trick covered many times in this thread, right back to 2010

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...23#post1997323

Just one of the thousands of good tips I must have over looked.

Feel free to remind me anytime though because I am getting old.

[delds]

After just going through an almost 2 day down time after accidentally deleting the wrong database, and finding out that the host which I had paid extra for weekly backups, and now finding out their 2 most recent backups that some tables missing and needing to go back more than 3 weeks to get a backup that had all the tables, I have grown a distrust on counting on the host backups only.

This really works well, just installed it and tried it and it works great.

I have 2 questions, is there a way to set daily auto backups or do I only have the options of weekly? Manual backups can be run at any time.

2nd Is it possible to remove the date prefex on the tables when backed up so for example it would backuup
access.sql
as
access.sql and not 2014-09-15-Access.sql ??

If I ever had to re upload I would not want the prefix on the tables and would have to rename each one first.
The folder gets names by date do I really need the tables with the prefex also?

next when downloading it to my local computer what mode should it be in ascii or binary?

[bzcomputers]

Originally Posted by delds

I have 2 questions, is there a way to set daily auto backups or do I only have the options of weekly? Manual backups can be run at any time.

2nd Is it possible to remove the date prefex on the tables when backed up so for example it would backuup
access.sql
as
access.sql and not 2014-09-15-Access.sql ??

If I ever had to re upload I would not want the prefix on the tables and would have to rename each one first.
The folder gets names by date do I really need the tables with the prefex also?

next when downloading it to my local computer what mode should it be in ascii or binary?

Yes, this mod is automatically set for doing daily backups. You need to adjust the "Date Format" option to set how many backups you would like to keep. You will find information on this at this link in the settings: http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php. What you may have currently set is "W" which will save each backup as the week number of the year. With a setting of "W" every daily backup for 7 days will overwrite itself when created and at the end of the year you will have 52 backups (probably not what you are looking for). I recommend a setting of "D" which will save your backups by day of the week. So you'll have one backup for each day of the week and the following week the backups will begin to overwrite each other. This way you will never have more than 7 backups saved.

Second, the prefix is just added to the file names, the tables contained within the .sql files are unchanged (no prefix added).

Last, when transferring use binary to be safe. Ascii transfers everything as a regular text file which can corrupt some data within the database. I also highly recommend using the option to combine all tables into one backup file and using Gzip. Less chance of issues all the way around.

[delds]

Thanks, I believe I have it set to auto backup every morning at 4 am. Single file backup of database gzip version, on the manual run it appears to backup perfectly. Will download to local computer in binary mode.

What software can I use on the local computer just to decompress to test that all tables are present?

[bzcomputers]

Originally Posted by delds

What software can I use on the local computer just to decompress to test that all tables are present?

DbVisualizer it has a 21 day free trial which you can download here: http://www.dbvis.com/
There are other programs out there also.

You can always just re-import into mysql as a different database name and view it all there also, then just delete the database when you're done (be careful you're deleting the right database!).

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by delds

Is it possible to remove the date prefex on the tables when backed up so for example it would backuup
access.sql
as
access.sql and not 2014-09-15-Access.sql ??

That prefix is only on the filename, not the actual backed up table within it.

[chikuru]

doesnt work on PHP 5.3.2
the window just display blank when clicking RUn Now from scheduled task..

[Paul M]

Sorry, but you are wrong.

It runs perfectly fine on php 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 & 5.6

In fact when I first wrote it, and started using it, I was still on php 4.x