Backup from web host question

[joeyrss]

CK, I already trust you with my forum life here and anyone with a a cool cat avatar is a friend of mine. Thank you too.

Mr. Phil, you are on it! I've already set it to allow guests to only browse the intro. board and no more as some of the suffering ones are truly maxed out with public comments and looks.

I will check into that mod you are talking about to keep the bots from reading forum content but I know our president wants good seo so would that limit that function? I have set up a child board to link to our website too as I saw no other way (at this point of my smf education anyway  ) to have the home page port to our site. I like the child board link, it works fine anyway.

I did set the registration up with three questions for spam protection and saw a mod that asks if you are human, is this another good one for preventing spam? I also was looking over the permissions for different groups and wondered how that works..like there is a group for parents of sick children only, can I keep others out of that group with this option?

Custom coding is something I would not mess with myself at this point but if we get someone on board down the road who knows css, then it would be a good option for sure.

Another question with the data backup as well as files on a weekly or nightly basis..do you delete the previous file first cause wouldn't you have tons of them otherwise? Or does the new one overwrite the previous one? Again, kind of new at this and thanks! My son facetimed me tonight from Seattle (works in Genius at Apple) and was proud of his mom for learning some new techy stuff thanks to all of you here.  I did not want to bother him with all these questions since he had umpteen projects to do by tomorrow.

[Chalky]

It sounds like you're really getting to grips with it! 

If you create a new membergroup for parents of sick children and add only those members to that membergroup (you can make it their secondary membergroup if you don't want others to see they belong to it) then in Admin > Boards > Modify Boards, click modify next to the board you want to be private to them and make sure their membergroup is checked while unchecking all other membergroups.  That way only they (and admins of course) will have access to that board 

I would suggest you keep several of your latest backups, simply because you don't necessarily realise you have a problem as soon as it happens and it can be useful to have the option to wind back a bit further than just the latest one.  I backup my database daily and my files weekly.  I manage them by saving each new backup in its own dated folder so they don't get overwritten by newer ones.  I do take it to the extreme and still have all my backups on my computer since my forum began in February last year but I'm not suggesting you do that    To keep a few is useful though 

[joeyrss]

Very good then, I need to date this first backup from last night as I like that idea of having more than one. I am one to have several products in stock at home just in case..ya never know when a store  might run out of ketchup or something.  And I don't think it's extreme really, not a hoarder but do like to be prepared for emergencies.

Hope this is not off topic for this category but I want to launch the forum soon to the members but how do I add the president as admin.? Do I give her a link to the forum and let her register etc. and then make her one or is there a way to invite her as I've not found one yet?

I'm kind of leery of adding too many mods for fear of messing something up like I did trying to add more smileys and taking a whole day to figure that out and fix it. I like the option of admins. and moderators leaving messages to each other though.

[Chalky]

Admin > Members > Registration > Register new member 

I think we've already gone off topic but don't worry about it, it's your thread, your prerogative 

[MrPhil]

One mistake people make is to only keep one very recent backup, such as their hosting service's nightly backup. It is quite possible to discover that your site was hacked a week ago and you only just realized it, so your only backup has the hack in it (i.e., is not a clean backup). You want to have an older backup or two so that you can recover from such unpleasantries (at the possible cost of losing very recent posts and attachments -- unfortunately there's no simple method to merge just the latest posts out of the newest backup with the clean older backup). Fortunately, most hacks involve inserting stuff into files and not affecting the database.

[joeyrss]

Thanks CK, found it and got that done.

Mr. Phil, thanks once again as your advice is worth a lot here.  Does this refer to database and files?

[MrPhil]

Both, really. For your average forum, the database is going to be more critical to back up, but the files should be backed up once in a while too, so you don't lose too many attachments and avatars. You might as well get in the habit of doing them both together.

[joeyrss]

Going to learn the file backup through filezilla so I can do that easily without any members in the forum yet.

"If you want to check the contents of your backup, the easiest way is to create a new database on your GD account, select import and upload your backup to it.  If all the tables are there and it looks like your real database then it's good  "

CK, I assume where it says "add" in my manage databases section at GD is where I create another one. Once I do that I can just upload the file to it to see my forum?

[Chalky]

Yes  . Well not to see your forum exactly, just the contents of your database backup 

[joeyrss]

Okay, thanks again.

[kat]

* K@ wonders if he can mark this as having been solved...

[joeyrss]

I dare to say yes! I will be back another time though..I'm sure. 

[kat]

You'll be entirely welcome, too!