Periodic site backups

About every month or so (meaning: whenever I think about it) I will do complete backups of all my sites on my server and download those backups to my local PC for safe keeping. This is a pretty intensive operation on the server, and during the backup itself, databases will be locked in order to capture an image of the data for the backup. So this means posting, replies, private messages, etc. will either seemingly pause for a long time, or perhaps even time out on you. Sometimes even reading threads will be troublesome, as there are tables in the database that get updated during even the read function for a viewer. Sorry about that, but just no way to avoid that from happening to accomplish the backup process.

There is no easy nor convenient way to alert everyone prior to this taking place, but I will say that I normally do this during the weekend when traffic seems slower here. Unfortunately I can't do it late at night, when traffic is even slower, because the process is quite lengthy, and just downloading even the single 255 gb file that is the backup of FaunaClassifieds takes a good amount of time. Even though I have the fastest download service that my ISP offers, what they claim I "could" be getting is really just a pipe dream, as I never get anywhere near that. So I have to try to time is such that I don't need to have it run past 4am when other processes take place on the server that run automatically.

So anyway, I am typing this right now because I intend to start the backup process right after posting this. Because, right now, I am THINKING about it.