Backing up a site collection from the command line

In addition to backing up my SharePoint site collection with Symantec BackupExec, I will occasionally use the command line tools to backup to file.  This is quite easy to do in just a few steps:

1. Logon to the SharePoint server as an administrator
2. Open an elevated command prompt
3. Change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\bin
4. Run the following command:

stsadm -o backup -url http://intranet -filename c:\intranetbackup

Depending on the size of the database, and server configuration this process can  take several minutes.  The exported file can be stored somewhere off site.

Tip: if the database is quite large make sure you have enough space on the disk that will hold the backup file.