I'm a woman
I know, tricky name
I try to install some mods. I don't want too many, I focus mainly on functional ones since i try to have a "serious" board, but so far I haven't installed too many on this site. I think your most important tables are related to users, topics, posts, categories ... they are the ones you don't want to lose when having a recovery. As for the mods, i think they won't harm that much since you can always reinstall a clean board and repopulate the tables I mentioned before and some others I don't remember. The main trick is to not use easy mod but to manually install all mods. Also keep a backup of the forums on your hard drive. I use phpdev to run a local server so I make the changes offline and have a backup for the site and for the DB. Needless to say they were quite useful after a server crash on the host
