Bulletproof Backups for MySQL

BY CHRIS LEA

February 04, 2010

You have all your important data backed up, right? I mean, come on folks, it’s 2010. We may not have flying cars yet like we’re supposed to, but “having backups” is a problem that’s solved. And I’m sure you’ve solved it. I’m sure you sleep well at night knowing that if a comet hit the data center where your website lives, and everything was completely destroyed, you could get back up and running somewhere else quickly enough.

Except that the chance this is actually true for you, statistically, is very small. If we look at the statistics, then what we see is that people are storing increasing amounts of things, important things even, online because disks keep getting bigger and cheaper (though sadly not much faster, but that’s a different article).

But despite this availability of cheap storage, people for the most part still don’t back things up. This isn’t universally true of course, there are some folks who have implemented really brilliant backup systems at their companies.

Of course, it helps when you have an amazing systems guy on your team who is made out of lighting bolts and awesomeness, taking care of the nitty gritty details for you. If, however, you are one of the many many people who doesn’t have a good backup strategy in place, this article is here to help you out.

I’ve written a shell script (Ed: please remove .txt extension before use) that will serve as a good starting point, and we’ll talk through it in a little bit. For now though, let’s discuss backups in a more general sense so we can decide what our end goals are.

Types of things to back up

There are lots of different kinds of data that you may…

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