Now that I am moving into making legit sites, I am using WP as CMS.
What is best way to backup WP on a massive scale ?

Themes are in the wp_content/themes dir. A simple single-shot backup is fine since nothing will change there.

"Massive scale" - are we just talking about a huge DB or lotsa different DBs? I've got a secondary database running as a slave to my main blog DB. I use a single DB with different table prefixes for different blogs. With MySQL slaving, the slave DB is always right on with the master.

I have a little cron job that shuts down slaving, waits about 30 seconds on the off chance that there's a huge amount to get committed, tar.gzs the tables then restarts slaving so I pick up whatever happened while I was offline. Then about 4 hours later another cron job runs that flushes the master queue so that the changes bin file does not get too big.

Are you looking for more than that?

I just rip mine for now, since they arent big enough. But for backing up i too am interested. obviously I every once in a while, dump the DB and download the blogs, but frankly, thats less than ideal.

I designed my backup around high availability, since I don't want to have to take my stores down. That's why I use the master-slave DB setup then backup the slave. But NBs I believe you're all MSSQL, yes? The technique would be different, but probably the methodology could be the same.

I can provide details of this technique for MySQL if you boys are interested.

/p

no i run wordpress on a shared host.

Php

 /mysql.

i just havent gotten around to it. will the day after it all crashes im sure...

There's a plugin for doing the backup thingie.

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

I use it alla timee.

cool dink, i shall check it out. thanks

my stuff is on various shared hosts, so the master slave thingie even thought it sounds like kinky probably will not work for me
I will see how dnks plugin works that seems more along my lines.

me being cheap, i wonder if i could use googlemail or something as my backup
make scripts that dump the tables then mail to googlemail account lmfao

legit sites on a massive scale

Depends on what your definition of "Is" is. 

Yeah, but "Is" dint inhale. 

Why is that no possible

Check to see if your shared host gives you access to cron and mysqldump.  Through a cron script, you can do a dump on the live database for Wordpress if you are certain you're not getting any writes (e.g. if comments are turned off), or pick a random time where you have little traffic if comments are turned on.  Have your script compress (gzip, bzip2, zip, compress) the dump file (which is text) and email it off-site if your db is small enough; ftp if it's not.  Obviously, if you have a huge fscking db, this is not feasible, but if so, wtf are you using shared hosting for?

Most shared hosting accounts generally have some sort of backup running, so unless you are planning a major change and fear problems, backing it up yourself is not 100% necessary.  Many also have an on-demand backup script that you can run out of their control interfaces (cPanel,

php

 MyAdmin, etc).

I run a "mirror" of my live sites here at the house on a

Linux

  server to do testing on.  Being a sys admin, I know it will save my a$$ at some point.

=RT=

yea i have cron and full mySQL. I didnt think of using cron to dump sql. because of the host I use, there is little to no danger of a technically issue causing a loss, however, hackers are a different story.

Crackers are always a worry--I don't use ftp with my shared hosting account as I have direct experience with that being a vector of attack at various $jobs.  I wish the low-end hosting services were more clueful about chrooted jails so they offered ssh.

One would hope that your hosting service has a reasonable disaster recovery plan in place that would cover this eventuality as well, though if the crackers are good at covering their tracks, it may be difficult to determine when they got in and, as a result, which backups to use to recover the site(s).

=RT=

FTP is fine if you're running across a VPN and the FTP is not publically available of course...
that's how all my stuff worx because I am hugely paranoid.

VPN <>shared hosting, bro!

Apparently they aren't willing to set up chrooted ssh enviro's at my host (allows them to upsell VPS, I guess), but they're about 10mi from my house and I used to work for the co that owns the colo facility, so I can knock on doors in the worst case.  The real killer in the shared hosting space is how few allow adult content.  Adult content friendly and price point (I quit my job before I had an income stream :doh were the two over-riding factors for my choice, outside of their reputation.

Hopefully I will be able to afford an upgrade to a VPS soon...

=RT=

Good luck with that RT - the single largest change for me was when I jumped from shared/VPS and such to my own dedis... then when I threw them behind IPCop with a VPN and started getting comfy with a real environment in a protected space with really high speed access it started getting great.

Hope you find yourself along that way soon...
/p

Me, too, Perk.  Having worked in very large enterprise enviro's I know what I'm doing is rinky dink, but it's better than hanging something off of my cable connection.

I guess I ought to get back to work and stop wasting time on the board, huh?

=RT=

Waste away mate. Not that I really wanted to work in any case...