Scripts to backup my forum? With linux

[IDN]

I have full root access to my machine running CentOS. (Although I would rather run the script as a user then as root) I know how to set up a cron job to backup my database. But what I am looking for is a way to backup my MySQL vB database every 24 hours at 3:01am and labeling it as the date. (vbbackup-day-month-year.sql for example) After a week of that it would delete the previous backup that is older then a week.

Does anyone know of a script, free or paid? It can be run via shell, cronjob, as a bash script, or anything that will run automatically on a linux machine.

[Floris]

vBulletin has a shell backup script. It is in the do_not_upload/ folder.

[IDN]

Does the script do what I need? How do I get it to run every 24 hours? Via cron?

[Sergio68]

vBulletin has a shell backup script. It is in the do_not_upload/ folder.

Interesting, I never noticed, it's more simple than tipe the whole command with that bunch of parameters.

How can that command be used with cron, I'm interested. I'll have a look on Google "manual".

[Sergio68]

Crontab syntax :-
A crontab file has five fields for specifying day , date and time followed by the command to be run at that interval.

* * * * * command to be executed
- - - - -
| | | | |
| | | | +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
| | | +------- month (1 - 12)
| | +--------- day of month (1 - 31)
| +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

A line in crontab file like below removes the tmp files from /home/someuser/tmp each day at 6:30 PM.

crontab 30 18 * * * rm /home/someuser/tmp/*


What we need should be : crontab 0 3 * * * /path/vb_backup.sh

[Cromulent]

This is the script I use :

#! /bin/bash

# Automated database datestamp backup



mysqldump --opt -C -u *USERNAMEHERE* -p*PASSWORD* *DBNAME* | gzip > /home/userdir/backups/`date +\%d\%m\%y`.gz

Also has the advantage of compressing your DB at the same time. Just setup Cron to run it when ever you want.

[Scott MacVicar]

Thats more or less what the script vBulletin includes does but it also parses your vBulletin config file to get the various bits of information.

[Sergio68]

If I'm on the same server I use mysqlhotcopy, do you think it's better or rather the same? (3 Giga)
Usually I dump the DB from another server, and I'm pretty much forced to use the mysqldump manual command.

[IDN]

Man issue I have, is will it delete the old files?

[Sergio68]

Man issue I have, is will it delete the old files?

Probably not, let's do it.

[Floris]

Maybe something like this works in a bash.sh script which you can put in your cron.

find /yourdir/backups -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \; // 5 is 5 days old

[Sergio68]

Done

We could just add the vbulletin version in the vb_backup.sh script since sometime we need to match web forum files backups with mysql backups.

[IDN]

What exactly does the backup scrip included do?

Looking at it, it will do dbname-date.sql? So, it would create unlimited copies technically. So all I need to do is figure out how to remove the files automatically?

[Scott MacVicar]

You might add a second cron script to do that or modify the current one to remove the oldest copy after the backup has been run.

[cirisme]

If I'm on the same server I use mysqlhotcopy, do you think it's better or rather the same? (3 Giga)
Usually I dump the DB from another server, and I'm pretty much forced to use the mysqldump manual command.

I used to use mysqlhotcopy all the time, it's great in theory and works well if you have slow disks, but pray you never have to restore. I always had to repair my tables which took a not so insignificant amount of time.

Then we switched to SCSI disks and the only reason I left mysqldump in the first place (backup/restore speed) was no longer a factor. Oh and plain text seems to compress better too.