One of the most important things that you will need to think about when you have any website is creating a back up for the site. Of course, with vBulletin, this is absolutely no different and you will have to create a backup of your forum every so often. There are a few ways that you can do this and it is a lot easier to actually do than you might think.
Back up from vBulletin Admin Panel
One of the ways that you can back up your vBulletin website is actually from the admin panel. All you need to do is to navigate yourself to Maintenance, then Database Backup in order to start. When you get to the page, you will need to choose the databases that you wish to backup. You can select that databases that you would like to backup by simply selecting the heck boxes that are next to the names of the databases. You should note that you should only choose this method if you have a relatively small forum as it will output the entire database straight to you. If you have a larger forum, you should output the backup to a server.
Backup using PhpMyAdmin
Of course, another way that you can back up your vBulletin website is using PhpMyAdmin. All you need to do in order to do this is to log into your PhpMyAdmin control panel and then select the name of the vBulletin database that you would like to back up from the drop down menu. All you need to do then is to click the export tab and your database will be backed up and exported. The best thing to do is save the output as a file on your computer and then you can be sure that you have the file backed up.
Of course, there are a few other ways in which you can back up your vBulletin database but these two are by far the easiest in our opinion, and the safest.