Backtalk Administration Guide:

You should, of course, be backing up your whole system regularly, but if you are about to delete a conference, you might want to make a backup copy of it for your archives.

This is easy to do, because the entire conference lives in one directory. If you use tar or whatever other Unix tool you prefer to save a copy of that directory, you should be able to restore it any time in the future.

The location of that directory is installation dependent. Normally it will be found under a directory named "bbs" in Backtalk's home directory. The "conflist" file, which you can view with the "Edit Conference Aliases" command on the Administration home page, gives the exact location of each conference.

If you want to save a bit of storage space, there are a couple files in the conference directory that you don't need to save, since Backtalk will quite happily regenerate them if they get lost. These are the 'sum' file and the entire contents of the indexdir subdirectory.

To restore an archived conference, first restore the saved directory to some directory under the "bbs" directory (it need not have the same directory name it had originally). Next, use the "Edit Conference Aliases" administration page to create a conference alias for the new directory. Then use the "Edit Conference Menu" page to add it to the conference menu.