TetraBB.com Home of Tetra-WebBBS and TetraBB PRO

Tetra-WebBBS stores all forum data on the hard disc of your server. No extra server is required (such as MySQL for example). Nevertheless Tetra-WebBBS uses DBM databases to build various indexes. DBM databases are extremely fast as they don't have all the overhead of SQL databases. Those DBM databases create database files on disc, which are specific to the operating system and the DBM database used.

Tetra-WebBBS maintains two different sorts of forum data, which are located in different places:

(1) data to protect against direct browser access
Everything that browsers don't need to access directly but only via the entry scripts is located below the folder defined in $data_basedir.
In fact you can consider everything in this folder and all it's subfolders to be the forums main 'database', regardless if the individual file is a DBM database file or a simple flatfile. $data_basedir is the forum's very own place where you better not add/edit/delete anything unless it is described in the docs.

(2) files that must be accessable directly by browsers
These are for example CSS files, icons, JavaScript files and, if you allow for uploads, images associated with posts and profiles.
All these files are stored in subfolders of the /webbbs folder which you created on setup of Tetra-WebBBS (see #2 of the setup guide ),

Further reading
For information of how best to protect your forum's data take a look at the Security guide.
More information on backups can be found here.