Database backups for selected tables only

[Marek Muc]

Do you create database backups for selected tables only? I've always clicked 'select all', but I wonder - is there any benefit in having separate backups of specific tables only?

[KevC]

Always do all tables.

They are interconnected so if you had to restore with only some of them, the board will not work.

[david63]

I always backup all tables but you can ignore the sessions and search tables as they can easily be rebuilt

[P_I]

Our standard practices has to perform two nightly mysqldumps. The first one has all tables but excludes the two large search tables and the second one is just the two search tables.

The resultant two files are compressed and then copied to two geographically different offsite locations.

Once a month we take a full site backup of all the files, excluding any cache directories.

[thecoalman]

Backing up individual tables may be helpful for those experiencing issues with php limits corrupting the backup. You can back up the largest tables like the post and search tables individually. Select the rest of them as one backup. If you are having these issues you really need to look into using SSH instead as it takes php limitations out of the picture.

I do full backup every night, I have been meaning to include incremental backup. The backup itself is handled by automysqlbackup which I have been using very successfully for many years.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

Not sure if it's possible to run that under shared hosting. It has multiple options including FTP to backup serveice like AWS, encryption of the backup or even emailing it. Of course emailing may not work with really large files because they may be rejected by incoming email server.

It's configurable but each day it creates a backup, the daily backups are rotated out so you have the last 7 days. Weekly backups are rotated out every 5 weeks and montly backups are rotated out every six months with default configuration. In my case they are saved to non public folder on the server, using Windows scheduler I schedule WinSCP to download the latest backup each night.

Any time I'm editing, updating or doing anything with phpBB files locally I always populate the local database with the latest backup to test it.

[warmweer]

Do you create database backups for selected tables only? I've always clicked 'select all', but I wonder - is there any benefit in having separate backups of specific tables only?

Actually quite regularly (for purpose of comparison with a default table).
It's also quite handy when a change has been made to 1 table only >>> export 1 table, and import only 1 table. This is particularly handy when having to "work" on a board without phpMyAdmin access.
Granted, this is a borderline case but I've had a couple of cases where I did get FTP (and Founder) access from the boardowner, but no phpMyAdmin access.

[Marek Muc]

All clear, thank you for all replies!