Backup of everything to do with PHPBB3 forums?

Hi all, how do you people with big forums, with big mysql databases do regular, twice daily backups of everything to do with your forums, including all files and databases, to your local computer please?

Wish I could tell you. I don’t have a clue because we, staff forum members, don’t take care about that. I assume that they will use an incremental backup system (that is, you do a first backup with everything and posterior backups would only add what’s not there). Furthermore if you have to backup twice a day.

Maybe @ralphm or @ophelie can ask how it was done before because right now I suspect that the company that runs Discourse will be responsible for that.

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That’s right. To clarify, Discourse is the forum platform we use, and they also handle our hosting. We don’t run local backups of the forums.

Just to be clear, I wasn’t particularly referring to these forums. Just in general, for backing up everyhting for any forum, including databases.

I think it depends on how much you’re willing to risk losing.

Definitely back-up a live site before upgrading anything, the changes tested elsewhere or otherwise.

Other than that, backing things up routinely and saving a few of the more recent ones wouldn’t hurt.
Better to have and not need than to need and not have.

Anyone here running their own forum? How do you people with forums, with mysql databases do regular, daily backups of everything to do with your forums, including all files and databases, to your local computer please?

You can just create an archive of the uploaded flat files and gzip a database dump. The source code and theme files should be in source control.

Thanks oddz, is that possible via crons?

It should be possible and I’m 99% sure that it is. But even if it wasn’t, you should be able to create a script for that and a cron job that would use that script.

The source code being in source control has nothing to do with cron but the rest yes.

Thank you very much oddz and molona. How would I do the above please?

I don’t understand the question.

How do I setup something to back up everything to do with a forum, including databases, say twice a day from the server to my local computer please?

I’m not familiar with the architecture of that platform. The specific implementation will be based on how and where data is stored and files are written. However, my first suggestion would be to use git and properly tag new releases. Once that is done all you need to do is backup the database and any flat files that are written to the file system but not part of the code base.

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