Have You Backed Up Your Database Lately?

[cameron]

Just a friendly reminded that maybe you should.
I was going to start doing it every week, but I did it today and it's been a month since the last one. Frequently updated sites should probably do it every day or two.

[MarkB]

All my sites are backed up to a second hard drive every day. When I ran my old vBulletin, I *should* have backed up daily, but it was huge... and I was lazy LOL so it was done *shiver* every 2 months or so...!

[r2d2]

Can you not setup a Cronjob to do it? Every day or so?

Certainly would if you have your own server..

[Mike]

Does anyone know what command you'd use for something like this in cronjob?

Thanks :)

[r2d2]

I think this:

http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/35093.html

is the one I used..

Theres a few things around if you search 'cron php mysql' etc, basicly you want to setup a crontab to call a PHP script that uses mysqldump, then you could get it to email the file to you or something.

[Mike]

Thanks for the link r2d2 :)

I just contacted my host and they said they would set it up for me, so may as well do that...

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Will they back it up to a different server.

I have some sites with a host that offer a different server to back up to.....

but they don't actually do the backups.

At least if i do it I know it is done (even if it is not as often as it should be ) :)

[Anat]

I pay $10 a month to my host for a complete backup of the whole server once every two days. Before I did that, I never got around to backuping everything on my own pc - it was just too much work. I had a cron job backuping everything on my server - but if the server itself was lost, so would have the backups.

[davesplace1]

I make backup copys on zipdrives every Sunday :) It has saved me a whole lot of work in the pass. If my hosting company looses my info no problem, if my machine crashes no problem. Well ok it still a hassle but it is not too bad.

[OnlineGuide]

Yea, I have it set for it to run once per day on some of my bigger sites, on all the rest the host is supposed to do it for all their clients. Only had to do it once, and I am happy that I was able to rely on my daily backups.

[paulfitz]

Answer: No!

I might be trusting my ISP too much .... I wish I had shell access I could automate it far more easily..

[romance]

i'm using a php script running via a cron job to backup my db daily and files weekly. This makes a copy on the server and I then send on the files by email to a gmail account and to my file server at home. I sleep well at night :)

[piniyini]

Romance, that sounds excellent - any idea where I can download it from?

Or did you make the script yourself?

I make a daily backup of my db via cronjob, code can be seen here http://www.toseef.com/2004/11/cronjob-database-backup-script.html

[Westech]

I have a daily cron job that makes dumps of my important databases, then ftp's them to a "server" that I have running in my house. The "server" is an old pentium 2 system whose sole purpose is to recieve these backups. This keeps the backups off of the original server just in case the unthinkable happens.

[Xander]

I've tended to find my lack of decenting regular backups(mostly of forum data) only crop up when I need the and they aren't in place.

Out of interest what backup methods do you use for large amount of data/sites? Do you do full backups or just changed files?