I have a forum and content management system which both use the same database. A module on my forum runs an automated task to backup this database to my email address and also in a directory locally. A couple of weeks ago I stopped getting backup emails, and when i run the ask manually I get the following error: QUOTE Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 10415192 bytes) in /home/marked/public_html/forums/sources/tasks/auto_mysql_backup.php on line 722 I need to get this working again reasonably quickly as I dont want to have to lose weeks of posts, members and content because my backing-up system isnt working. I've had to restore the database before, and luckily I had the days before backup. Is this something to do with .htaccess? Can I "increase" my allowed memory size? What can I do here? Thanks in advance.

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You might need to re-write your backup script to perform the Database back-up for single Tables at a time instead of all Tables at once.
Or back-up by date only. Depends on the db structure and several other issues, really.


For instance, check Posting Dates of Posts and Topics and only backup the most recent ones.

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Thanks for your reply.

So basically you're saying my database is too big?

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Yes. You're just trying to insert too much data at once. When you backup, the data *HAS* to go through memory during data copy - which is limited. Backing up bit by bit instead of all at once avoids this memory limit.

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This script that backs-up my database is actually a forum module. So it was written by someone else, not me. And it's options do not include backing up bit by bit. I looked through the options and changed them around to try and get it to work, with no luck.

It makes it a lot more risky with out backing it up. If anything goes wrong, and it has in the past, we lose a lot data. And from the sounds of things, this module simply isn't going to work.

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