Having nearly completed my initial forum installation, integration and configuration, I wanted to checkout any recommended procedures for backup and recover. I run my system via a web host provider; therefore I keep all files on my local machines anyway and upload via FTP. As such I have already downloaded all the Eblah files, which essentially act as a system backup.

I have seen the `backup forum` under `Admin Center`, which seems to produce the file: backup_full.tar.gz in the forum root directory. However, I haven’t seen any option that actually does the backup recovery.

Is this a manual process?
If so, would it be best to download the .tar.gz file to my local machine, unzip and save?

I'm not sure whether I can/need to unzip this file on the remote host, I need to check. The backup file seems to mainly contain all the user and configuration data files, but no installation runtime? So wanted to outline some different levels of recovery that other Eblah administrators may have already devised, e.g.

Host loses everything:
Requires installation followed by user/config data backup recover?

Hacker gets in and corrupts things:
Could try data backup first? If OK fine.
Otherwise do full installation and backup recovery?

I would of thought the boards, messages & member folders of the forum are the most volatile and therefore you might want to back these up the most often and then download to another machine?

Would appreciate hearing of any other approaches based on practical experience.
Thanks.

You can open it with WinZip. Some servers allow you to run gzip commands to unzip it.  Usually I always try that method.