Any one who has been running forums and blogs or for that matter any database driven application, for any length of period knows the importance of backups. After all, all it takes is a corrupted database or your host going bust, and one would be left without the precious content you have worked so hard to build.

This is where the script I am talking about today comes in handy; the script is built by Ryan from Admin Fusion and is a cron script that can take automated backups for you.

I first decided to test it out on my personal blogs database, once I had downloaded the script and read all the instructions, I was able to set it up in less than 5 minutes. And this despite the fact that I don’t know any thing about coding! And to top that it works wonderfully.

The script in question here can take up to three database backups in the backup directory you specify, however you can counter that by either tweaking the script or by running multiple instances of it.

For instance, if you run an active forum than you would love to have backups that take place every few hours as well as one which takes place every day. For that purpose you can create two backup folders with one instance each of this script, one scheduled to take back up every 6-8 hours another that takes backups every 24hours. This will ensure you have at least 6 database backups to work with, in case some thing goes wrong!

Apart from this you can use some thing like SyncBackSE (another one of Ryan’s recommendation) to automatically download those backups to your local hard drive.

Click here to know more about this nifty little script…