If so, is it easy to do? Do you hire someone or do it yourself? Since mine is Proboards, I have never had to back up my forum. However, I'm always interested in learning how to run a paid forum if I ever migrate over.
How long does it take to back up your website, forum, blog? How often do you do it?
You can go with a third-party software/company that will do backup from every week or every month or in some cases every day 🙂 Yet it does come at a price. The hosting company that you with my offer that anyway. Under software in my Cpanel, I have a company called codeguard that's from $5 a month
But I do not have that, save me money and do it myself 🙂 Every day MySQL database gets backed up and removed every 30 days. And since I'm under the 10GB or 20GB data that I'm allowed, my host does automatic weekly full backups 🙂 Yes, my host offers free backup and restore as long as it's under the cap data that I'm allowed and if I go over, it does not get backup.
My forum automatically makes a backup weekly, and I can make one myself whenever I want by just going into the ACP. I'm glad that MyBB has such a simple way to make backups since it took some stress off my back when trying to learn everything else about the software and self hosting.
I make backups in the cPanel whenever I think of it. I believe my webhost makes backups nightly. Since my forum has a large database it'll take a couple minutes to download. Sometimes I'll delete the search index before I make a backup so the file will be smaller, then I'll rebuild the search index after the backup is completed.
I have enabled auto backup on my Cpanel and my forums are automatically backed up every week. Sometimes I also manually back up and save the database locally on my computer just to make sure that I still have my website when my Cpanel gets hacked.
You really should. I've read enough horror stories to know that host based backups fail at quite an alarming rate. Luckily they are rarely required but when they are needed they often don't appear to be particularly robust. Another point worth mentioning is that in the event of a catastrophic failure, it's usually far quicker to restore your site from your own backup.
I run an automated job to take a database backup every 12 hours and dump it zipped onto a secondary server from which I take a weekly download. I also keep a separate backup of my server files for both before and after any upgrade or change.
My hosting provider has backups, so I don't have to manually make them myself. Though I should probably make a back up myself, since I don't want to risk losing everything... You just never know.
I back up my files with the host. But I'm not a fan of this insane "Software as a Service" pricing strategy. I can put up with it for a while, but when a host decides its ok to raise prices, I get frustrated. I went with the host, because of their world-class hosting, and customer service, but once I tested the new price increases. The server invoices keep going up, up, and up. I been looking for a new host, but I see them in the top 5, top 10 host lists.
Its annoying.
But I DO download a copy of my cPanel files, like everyone else in this thread. Hell, when they asked us to move off cPanel because of the price increases, I stayed with cPanel not only because of the familiarity, but their backups.
We have our forums set to backup at least once a week and we will always backup when we need to make any updates for the forum so that if anything goes wrong, we can revert back to the backup and not lose anything. At the moment with my PC being a little older now and sometimes restarting out of the blue, the other admin takes care of the backing up for now so that nothing goes wrong on my end with the backup or potentially losing the backup.
