Hi Guys, I've notice that most of the website owners that I know of don't really give much importance to database backup. This warning goes out to the article directories, forums or mailing list owners, that totally relying on your web hosting for database backups is the worst bet you can make. You can have hundreds of new records in your database daily as your website grows bigger, so even a 1 day downtime without proper backup can really cause you alot of time and money. Think about it. So what I've done here is to put together some of the basic steps that I have successfully used to back up almost all of my websites. So get your free download at the my signature link below Just reply this thread if there's anything you think I have missed out in that guide. Cheers! Sunny Tan
Any one who doesn't back-up, is a n00bie!!! Depends on the size. Even a 150 meg database takes less than a minute for back-uping. The hard part can be downloading it to your computer if you're on a slow internet connection, or it's huge for the speed of your connection. To you dial-up users, I fill your pain!!!! I remember when 150K was huge!!!!
My host company backs up everything once a week. Trick is to back up the day after they back up. Now if there was a way to backup only new additions to the databases, it would help a lot.
I backup every weekend. Then download the backups to my pc AND copy to an external hard drive. I don't trust my host's backups alone.
Every time a major change on the site. I have phpMyAdmin installed on the server so it's just a few steps to export the database already zipped.
I am not having any DB but still do I need to backup my site ? (I don't think so) I think people can cron the backup job and the uploading to your computer can also be automated
offsite backups are inexpensive these days, i have rysnc backup my entire servers daily to another server in a different dc. Rsync only backups new data each day, not the whole server saving on processor. I also download backups of my databases weekly
I didn't, but I will now as I just had a scare! I tried installing a phpbb forum with Fantastico and it f****d up the databases that were there already. Luckily, I don't know how, but I recovered everything and I am now loooking at getting into the habit of making frequent back ups. But you never feel like it's important until something goes wrong! just, Back up!
Since i built a site that got 1000 members in a month, 100,000 posts... then got hacked and db wiped... i back up very regularly... back up lads!
We do nightly backup of the database via mysqldump and for more redundancy always have a backup database server in replication mode with the master so if it fails we have a backup server ready to take its place in few minutes.
You can do it with PHPMyAdmin. Personally, I use: mysqldump -hhostname -uusername -ppassword databasename > backupfile.sql
I backup the databases and files every single night. A client's website recently got hacked, and I didn't have a full backup of it, and the hosting guys were wanting $15 for a week old backup. Yuck.
I use PhpMYSqlAutoBackup from http://www.dwalker.co.uk/ You can set it (via a cron job) to send you an email with a dump of your database at whatever frequency you require. It can also store said backup on the server. Been using it for about three months without any problems. amofw
Thanks for the link, amanoffewwords. I'm going to try PhpMYSqlAutoBackup. I back up every 3 or 4 days, and this would take care of that automatically. Nice.
I have 2 hard drives on the server. 1 acts as the main and one is a backup and I have it back up all files and databases everynight because you never know!