[Forum] saving new vbulletin before customizing

[Josephu]

Hello, Ive been fumbling around asking dumb questions here and there, but I am learning. Ive purchased vbulletin suite and purchased hosting (Thank you everyone who PM'd me about hosting and installation, but I am now set up, thank you!) my question is, before I start customizing and personallizing my site, should I save it? that way if (when) I screw it up, Ive got it all saved. If so, How? Thank you

[Trevor Hannant]

You can certainly backup your database however if you're styling the site, just create a new style then customise that. That way, you always have the default as a fall back.

The most reliable method of backing up and restoring a database is with shell access via ssh. This is because backing up with a PHP script like phpMyAdmin can result in PHP timeouts errors and an incomplete backup file. Please see the instructions here:

Backup:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/maintenance_ssh_backup

Restore:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/maintenance_ssh_restore

P.S. If you don't have shell access, some people have also reported success with these scripts:

MySQLDumper:

http://www.mysqldumper.de/en/index.php

MySQLHotxcopy:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134821&highlight=mysqlhotcopy

Bigdump:

http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

There is also a Cron based backup modification at vbulletin.org - you can find this on the following link:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231481

You can also download the new style as you go so that if you've made a number of changes then do something wrong, you can restore to one of these.

To do this, go to AdminCP > Styles & Templates > Download/Upload Styles