MyBB Documentation

Database Backup

The 1.6 Documentation is no longer maintained and some information may be outdated.

The MyBB 1.6 series reached end of life on October 1, 2015.

This means there will be no more security or maintenance releases for these series and forums running these versions of MyBB may be at risk of unfixed security issues. All administrators are strongly encouraged to upgrade their forums to the latest release of MyBB as soon as possible.

There are three ways to backup your database, through the MyBB Admin CP, phpMyAdmin, or SSH/Telnet.

For information on backing up your database through the MyBB Admin CP, see Admin CP: Backups.

  1. Login to phpMyAdmin and select the database you wish to dump.
  2. Click on the "Export" tab at the top of the page.
  3. Click "Select All" below the list of tables.
  4. Make the format is SQL.
  5. Click "Save as File" to download the result, or leave this box unticked to view it on-screen.
  6. Ensure that both "Structure" and "Data" are ticked.
  7. Choose a compression type, if any, from the bottom of the form.
  8. Click "Go".

Not all hosting accounts have this, you'll have to ask your host if you have SSH access.

  1. Log into your SSH/Telnet account.
  2. Type mysqldump --opt -Q -uUSERNAME -p DATABASENAME > /PATH/TO/DUMP.SQL
    • USERNAME - this is the username you use to access MySQL. You can find it out by looking in inc/config.php
    • DATABASENAME - the name of the database that MyBB is installed on.
    • /PATH/TO/DUMP.SQL - this is the path to the file that will be stored. If you don't know where to put it, use mybb_backup.sql or something like that.
Tutorials
Database Backup - Database Restore - How to CHMOD - User-submitted tutorials on the Community Forums

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