You never really appreciate what you have until it’s gone.
One of my webhosts experienced an unfortunate incident with their webserver’s primary hard disk on Saturday. For some reason the file system became corrupt and the server basically shut itself down. As with most critical systems, there should always be some form of backup in place and this situation was no different except that the backup was in the form of a RAID array.
The theory behind this particular RAID set-up was having two separate disks effectively mirroring each other. In the event that the primary disk fails then the secondary disk could be quickly swapped in place. Unfortunately, this mirroring meant that the file corruption on the primary disk was replicated onto the secondary. The result being two disks, both corrupted in the same way, neither operable.
So there was no quick swap, but there were weekly backups to fall upon, but because the backups were taken on a Sunday and it was a Saturday it meant that the backups would be almost a week old. The reality was that the most reliable backup was 13 days old!
Fortunately, I keep my own backups so I wasn’t too concerned about data loss, but there were some personal projects I’d been working on that hadn’t yet been backed up, mainly due to the lack of cPanel functionality to backup databases easily.
What’s needed is a way to schedule automatic backups of a full cPanel reseller account just like you can with Ensim.
Anyway, today, I’ve been searching for a script that will carry out the following in some fashion:
- can be scheduled using cron,
- can dump multiple MySQL databases,
- can compress the backup SQL files,
- has some method of transfers the resulting dump off-server (email or FTP)
The plan was to use such a script to carry out daily backups of databases and then send them to a GMail account where there’s 2GB of file storage maintained by the Google techs. This isn’t to replace other backup procedures, but provides another layer of security for personal projects.
Hunting on Google led me to this page of database tools, which then led me onto db_backup. This script has now been installed and tested in less than an hour and my initial thoughts are 
