need advice from a BigBoard owner

I nearly had a heart attack yesterday when the harddrive on my box crashed after a reboot.
Luckly the lab managed to recover all the data, but I learnt a very valuable lesson about keeping on top of server management... you see since my wife gave birth a few weeks ago I've been forgetting to download the cron'd backups.

I get a couple thousand posts a day so want to dump the database twice a day and sync an offsite backup.

My question is:

The cron locks the tables while backing up. Does anyone know how long the tables lock for (my database is about 100mb at the mo.) and is it safe to backup at about 7pm when we have about 60 members online (without causing too many problems)?

Any advice would be great

Regards,
S.C>

What "lab" to you use for data recovery?

100mb isn't very big at all. shouldn't take but a few seconds to run.

I think the real issue here is you need a raid 5 setup on your server. relying on a single drive is a huge infrastructure mistake.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

What "lab" to you use for data recovery?

@ Joe - In the data center there's an area out the back called the lab where the technicians work.

@ briansol - Your right 100mb isn't a lot, but we've managed to rack up over 200,000 posts in just over a year so I really need to think ahead when the database gets bigger (and when we stand to lose a lot more) - RAID is definitely on the list of things that need sorting.

I never for one moment thought I would be running a dedicated server let alone have a forum that gets a minimum of 30,000 page views a day (and that's before installing vBSEO), so things like structure and scalability have kinda crept up on me.

W.>