Jerod Poore

From my days as a sysadmin the table locks should keep the integrity of the database. With all the various flavors of MySQL and OS in the mix, temporarily denying access to one's board is the only guaranteed method. If you're tight for space, isdoo's suggestion is the way to go. tar with the -z argument will compress the file more than gzip alone. With tar it's faster and easier to backup and compress all the other files associated with IPB, so if you have it in a script it's just one more command. The tar argument --index-file=[somefilename]creates a list of all the files you backed up, which can come in handy.