I just tried to backup my data files, and got this error about half-way through the procedure:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3383773 bytes) in /home/www/jakchat/forums/admin/dodbbackup.php on line 157

any thoughts?

Easy, your alotted memory from your server was completely used... You had used 8388608 bytes (8 megabytes) and the script tried to use 3383773 additional bytes (3.2270174 megabytes).

Your webhost would have to increase the php memory limit which would be doubtful in most cases (16mb is a nice round upgrade number to request).

Your best bet however wouild be to run backups from command line, they're much faster and don't rely on the php variables.

thanks for that. how do run backups from the command line? (you mean the mysql command line i presume).

Nope, I mean through an SSH or Telnet session using the mysqldump command:


Whichever directory you issue the command from will be where your database_name.sql file will be created; additionally you can specify a path before database_name.sql.

How, if you have PHPMyAdmin you could create an archive (tar, tar.gz, .zip, etc) of yoru forums which will download much faster, but depending on the size of your forums I'm not sure if it'd time out or not going this route.

i could not get database_name to work (i don't know the names of the databases, but i noticed an option for "all-databases" and i used that instead.



this means, of course, that all the databases are in one file. does that matter??

database name woudl be whatever your database name is; as I don't know your setup I just put "database name" in there... You can get the name of the database that UBB is using out of your configuration file...

As you can see fromt he ines i posted, you'd have to replace "username" "password" and "databasename" with the appropraite information; hostname shouldn't have to be used though since it'll by default try localhost.

i tried without using hostname, but it didn't work for me on my system ... obviously my localhost is not the same as my mysql hostname.

ahh, in that case your mysql username probably isn't set to accept connections from localhost (probably just the loopback address)

I hope that you got your backup built from the command line though

yes, the command-line method worked just fine, and very fast!

lol indeed fast... generally though I woudln't recommend using the all-databases flag though, since i'tll backup every db you have access to (and on a missconfigured server you may snag crap you won't want or that aren't your db's), instead you shoudl specify the databases that you want specifically.