Backups

How often do you generate a backup of your forum? Do you have an automated service to create backups daily, weekly, or monthly?

As some hosting providers do offer a service which generates a backup of your forum daily, I do not usually buy these services.
Unfortunately, I do not create a backup daily (which should be done). Backups are very important, and should be done daily, if not sooner than that. With the amount of content, updates, and members forums get each day, an old backup will lose everything after the date it was created.

Just recently, I wanted to import members and posts from and old, retired forum of mine into my current one, and luckily I thought to download a backup beforehand just in case. A few moments later, my forum was gone and it had reverted back to the old one. Not sure what I did wrong, as I am not very technical, but luckily I contacted my hosting provider, and provided the backup I had downloaded. Within minutes, everything was fixed and back to normal.

Do you download backups? If not, you better start just in case.

I have a backup that runs twice a day. I like having them back up as soon as possible because it makes me feel so much better if something were to happen with my forum. 

I download them once or twice a week.

I didn't know about backups. With that, I think I am prone to events that may put my forum's data at stake.

I don't really handle the technical side of our forum but I believe we automatically do backups multiple times a week. We've had our forum hacked before and thankfully we were able to get back online with minimal issues because we had backups. It's definitely a good idea to have backups - anything can happen.

Backups are crucial, especially if you're trying to install a new theme, new plugins, etc. and something goes wrong. I believe on most hosts, they generate backups for you so you don't have to. But it's always best to create your own backups, just in case something goes wrong. That's one of the downfalls on some free hosts, they don't provide you with a backup of your forum so if something goes wrong it's on them and you may have to wait for them to fix something. Though some free hosts, such as Jcink, does allow you to make a backup of your forum. (Plus if you're ever wanting to migrate your forum from one software to the next, you'll need a copy of your MySQL database which essentially is a backup of your forum.)

My hosting takes one ever day and I take my own at least once a week. Better safe than sorry.