Here are three ways you can make a backup of your vBulletin database. Pick the one that's right for you and make a backup today!
From the vBulletin admin panel
In your admin panel, visit Maintenance -> Database Backup. You can choose which database tables to back up by clicking on their respective radio buttons, or just accept the default of backing up all tables. Submitting that first form will output the entire database directly to you, so ONLY choose that method if you have a small forum.
A much safer option is to backup your database to a file on the server. This file must be writeable via PHP, meaning it must be chmodded 755 or 777 depending on your server. By default it will be saved to the web root, meaning that anyone could download it, so make sure you specify a different path or download the file to your hard drive.
At the bottom of the page, you will find the option to make a comma separated text file backup of a single table. This would be a really inefficient way to back up your entire database, but if you need that data for some other application it might be useful.
Backing up via PhpMyAdmin
If you don't know how to log on to phpMyAdmin, contact your host for instructions.
First, select the name of your vBulletin database from the drop-down menu, or click on the name if it's your only database. Once the database's page loads, click on the Export tab.
Make sure all the tables are selected.
You should probably check off Add Drop Table, which will drop all the tables from the database and overwrite them if you ever restore from that file. You generally want this to happen, else you'll have two copies of everything in each table. Just remember all current data will be lost when you do a restore.
I advise you to check Save to File, else your entire database will be listed on the next page. Click the Go button when you're ready. It will take a while to build the file, but eventually a window will pop up prompting you to save the file.
Backing up via command line
If you have a very large database, backing up via the command line might be your only option once phpMyAdmin starts to time out. Log on to your shell account and at the command prompt enter:
Code:
mysqldump -h -p mydbname | gzip > mydbname.sql.gz
replacing mydbname with your database's name and mydbname.sql.gz with the name you want for your backup file. I suggest including the date. Your database will be dumped and gzipped into that file.
You also need to copy your current vBulletin files to your hard drive, but I'm assuming for the purposes of this tutorial that you already know how to do that. Make frequent backups so you'll always be ready for a server meltdown!
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