what kind of database backup system are you using?

fh111

i was wondering what you are using?

i am hoping to find a good php script that i can fire via cron but haven't found something that works flawlessly yet.

thought maybe somebody here knows something : )

peregrine

there are a few plugins at wordpress that do it, maybe you can get some ideas from those plugins.

For me a few mysqldumps in a script is sufficient, but I don't have many users to worry about. .

AstonJ

Try this: http://astonj.com/tech/ultimate-mysql-backup-script-part-one/

You need root access and it's based on servers with cPanel

fh111

thanks! i wish i could use that.

the limitations:

• shared hosting

• sadly no cpanel, only confixx

• i don't have access to the confixx-panel, which is a little annoying (i am only involved in development and don't own the domain)

• no ssh access available

• probably no perl (if perl worked i would use mysqldumper in combination with a cron job)

i was playing with phpMySQLAutoBackup and i am triggering a php script with a cron job, which works fine, but after importing a database backed up with this tool all special characters are messed up.. (it's a german community, so theres many ü,ä,ö-characters)

hbf

i use a mysql dump on hourly intervals with a bit of house cleaning to limit the number of actual backups.. but i have root access so it's easy...

peregrine

fh111 - I bet you there's a chance perl is available. throw a litlle script up there to echo your name and put it in cron, before you go to the trouble of writing it, of course you could exec stuff through php too. Are you setting the collation and all the language settings for the field in the database creation from the imported files for the internationalization.

hbf

honestly if i didn't have the box sitting at my house, i'd probably just create a little php page or something that i could trigger on a cron. have it store the sql files in folder and ftp them to a place of your choosing.

fh111

peregrine said:
fh111 - I bet you there's a chance perl is available.

i just found out that there is a cgi-bin folder which was/still is not visible to me..but i asked the owner to drop the .pl file of mysqldumper in there and set up a cron & it works like a charm!

mysqldumper was my preferred tool anyway, but perl was needed. so happy

thanks for your replies : )

Tim

Just so you know, mysqldump (and any tools based on it) will lock your database for the duration of the backup, so your users will be unable to access the forum during that time. If you have a large database, this could be upwards of an hour.

hbf

Tim said:
Just so you know, mysqldump (and any tools based on it) will lock your database for the duration of the backup, so your users will be unable to access the forum during that time. If you have a large database, this could be upwards of an hour.

@tim what lower impact approach do you recommend? I'm all ears.. I've been noticing a few timeouts on my site and this my be the cause.

Tim

The best way is to run a secondary system as a replication slave and take your backups from that system. There are also ways to cleverly fake being a replication client and use the log sequence numbers to take incremental backups, but this is a lot more complex. Anything beyond mysqldump is a lot of pain to set up and maintain.

hbf

Thanks. That makes sense, not sure im ready to setup a replication server just yet. Sounds like a fun/challenging project but i dont have a machine for it just yet. I have a few other architectural changes i want to tackle first anyway....