# Recommended backup process for very large forum? **URL:** \ **Category:** Support\ **Created:** [11 Luglio 2017, 2:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/recommended-backup-process-for-very-large-forum/65999 "2017-07-11T14:16:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![lkramer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/lkramer/32/83897_2.png) [@lkramer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lkramer)\ **Post date:** [11 Luglio 2017, 2:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/recommended-backup-process-for-very-large-forum/65999/1 "2017-07-11T14:16:56Z")
Hello. I’m looking for advice on how best to setup a reliable backup system for one of Discourse forums I administrate. The backup file that gets generated is around 3GB. (This forum was populated by importing 20 years worth of a mailing list emails with images, thus the size.) We use [Communiteq](https://www.communiteq.com) (formerly DiscourseHosting) as a host which takes daily backup of the database and files for disaster recovery purposes and stores them off-site. They only guarantee to store one backup at a time and not the archiving of several old backups. This is great as a first line of defense but we feel it would be wise to have an additional backup system completely under our control which also involves archiving a few backups at a time. The question is, what’s the best way to do this given the size of the backup in terms of successfully dealing with the transfer of a large backup file and avoiding a long amount of read-only downtime? I’ve been trying to get the built-in Amazon S3 backup to work with no luck so far. I’ve also read about a [discourse dropbox backup plugin](https://github.com/xfalcox/discourse-backups-to-dropbox) but haven’t tried it yet. Before I dive too deep into Amazon or Dropbox as a solution, I’m wondering what other ideas/experiences people have regarding huge backups like this? Thanks! --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/recommended-backup-process-for-very-large-forum/65999)._