BuddyPress.org

Hi all
I just recently took over running a pretty heavily modified buddypress site (fully updated wordpress and buddypress installs) with a lot of activity (cant link to it as it is for a school). I know my way around wordpress (especially front end developing), but buddypress seems like a whole other game. And i keep running into dead ends when i have questions. So here are my three most pressing questions:

1) Backup. I want to do this manually once in a while – beyond the normal wp-db backup what should i do? – anything not obvious to be aware of?

2) When logged in the top most thing the user sees is a ‘whats up?’ ‘post to profile’ field. I want that gone, but cant find anything in the settings or in this forum?

3) When logged in and viewing the activity stream. Forum posts show up with a link to the poster, forum and group. What is really missing is a ‘read more’-link to the post being displayed. Again my search has not helped. How can i insert this link into the activity stream version of the post?

I hope my questions are not too dumb 😉