Forum management & security: what kind of workflow do you employ?

[rcane]

What kind of workflow or routine procedures do you all use to ensure things are backed up properly, secure, and otherwise running smoothly?

I'm up to just under 1400 members now.

[Kindred]

Host backs up files & databases daily and weekly.

I also use mysqldump with a cron job to do my own backup, nightly.

[shadav]

I had an issue in the past with my host's backups so now I manually download all files and then manually export all databases whenever I'm working on my sites
but yeah my host does daily/weekly backups as well (just I'm not solely relying on them because the last time I did, I found out the hard way my host sucked and while they did backups and even I used their backup tool they were all corrupted, so now I download everything manually)

[Doug Heffernan]

I will echo the manual backup as well. It is always best imo to make your own backups as well and not rely only on your host to do so.

ANother thing that I would recommend is to set up a test forum and restore the backup to its database. Like that you know for sure that the backup is done properly and won''t be in for a surprise when the time comes to use it for real.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Host does nightly backups, saves 30 days on different server, so if home server gets nuked backups are retained.  Also run cron jobs to do nightly backups and save 30 days, so backups are on both servers.  Download backups so I have local copies whenever I think of it (not often enough).