I used mysqldump to backup the forum and the forum database. The forum database is 84,046,398 bytes tarred. I moved it to a new server (thanks to Gizmo's handy guide ! Now I want to prune the existing forums (on the old server) Through the ubbthreads control panel, it's only pruning 20 topics at a time every several seconds and there are 35,887 that need to be pruned. Pruning would take days at that rate, so I wondered if there are other options (i.e. direct sql command, etc.).

Thanks Gizmo, for the GREAT guide to get me started with the transfer! One note for you to possibly include in future editions of your guide: When the SQL and Web servers are different, the --host= command can be added to the mysqldump command (e.g. mysqldump --host=mysql.serverhost.tld -uusername -ppassword my_database_name > my_database_name.sql).

Bill