Is your webhost using a webhosting control panel like cPanel? Maybe there is an option to create a backup in the control panel itself?

Originally Posted by Gizmo
I have been looking at this for several hours today and spent some time last night trying to just obtain a copy of your database...
- The UBB.threads backup utility fails after exporting some data, "You don't have permission to access this resource."
- I found and installed 3 PHP backup scripts, all error out 500 when attempting to access system commands to write a database dump
Was this 403 error? In this case this could be caused by a rule in mod_security. I have seen this quite often with various scripts. You could try to disable mod_security by adding the following lines to the .htaccess file:
Code
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>
This is only working on Apache based installation but there may be also an option to disable mod_security in the webhosting control panel

Error 500 indicates an error in the PHP script. This could be caused by disabled PHP functions. Some webhosts are disabling PHP functions such as system() due to security or performance reasons, especially for websites hosted on a shared virtual hosting plan. If you have no access to the log files, you could try to add after <?php:
Code
error_reporting( E_ALL );
ini_set( "display_errors", "on" );
This should show the actual error message rather then just an error 500 message. Off course, only for debugging purpose wink