I host and manage about 50 different websites. The vast majority are static sites for friends and family that don’t require any backup processes above the daily backup provided by my webhost. In the 8 years that I’ve been running websites I’ve been with about 12 hosting companies and even though my current server has had amazing uptime and backup availability I don’t like to have all my golden eggs in one basket. This is especially true with the 5-8 sites that I manage that have very dynamic content populated into MySQL Databases including forums, blogs, etc.
I needed a process that would help me sleep peacefully at night. As mentioned twice before on this site I’m pretty diligent about computer backups. In my opinion it is exponentially important to backup the constantly changing information on my sites. Just a single day’s loss of data could be a huge problem. For example, on one of my sites, http://www.backyardchickens.com/ there are about 20 new members signing up per day and members are posting about 1,200 new posts per day. Imagine loosing a week or a month’s worth of members and posts!!!
My Database Backup Process & Software:
- After trying a few different MySQL backup scripts I found a gem hidden within a blog. Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script works flawlessly and does everything I need.
- I have the script setup to run every morning around 3:00 AM EST to do a full backup of about 7 MySQL Databases.
- The last 3 days worth of backups are kept on one of my secure folders on the server.
- Each day’s backup is also sent to a completely different web host and server in a different state.
- Each day I synchronize my desktop computer with this second web host server and download each days backup files.
- Every month I burn all the backups to a DVD and put them into a fire safe.
If you’ve been counting that is 3-5 copies of my databases that are backed up in different locations throughout the US. If you count the daily backups my hosting company provides that bumps the number up to about 7 copies of each day’s DB backups!
Database Backup - Only Half The Battle:
Well, the process above sounds very impressive, but about a year ago I made an almost fatal mistake. Learn from my experience and know that your backups are only as reliable as the last time you attempted to restore one of the backups.
Prior to using Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script I was using an application that had been working fine for me for the previous 2 years. I hadn’t needed a DB restore for about 10 months when I had someone come in and hack one of my forums. I attempted to restore my most recent DB backup file and got errors. I tried to restore one that was 2 days old… same errors. After trying 2 more backup files I gave up and called my server admin to have them restore their backup… phew! After this fire drill I discovered that my backup script has stopped working about 4 months prior!!! I don’t know if it was a change in my hosting environment, the size of the DB’s or some other odd problem, but that’s when I abandoned that application for something new. Since then I’ve been using Ameir’s script without fail. BUT, the moral of this story:
- Backup soon and backup often
- Frequently try to restore your DB backups to ensure all your hard work and preparation is paying off.
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