My wife is constantly reminding me that “technology will always fail you” and she’s right. Muphy’s law states that if anything can go bad, it will! As far as I can remember I’ve had hard drives die on me, and that is why I always backup everything. On top of backing up everything I always test my backups, if you don’t test your backups it’s sort of like you never did a backup in the first place.

Creating backups has been a big part of my life.

here is a script to backup all MySQL Databases to individual files

for I in $(mysql -p -e 'show databases' -s --skip-column-names);
do mysqldump -p $I | gzip > "/var/www/mysqlbackups/$I.sql.gz"; done

Here is a simple one liner to back up everything in your www folder to a mounted hard drive on /mnt/sdb5

tar zcvf /mnt/sdb5/backups/backup$(date '+%F_%H%I%S%P').tar.gz /var/www  

-z, --gzip "filter the archive through gzip"

-c, --create "create a new archive"
-v, --verbose "verbosely list files processed"
-f, --file=ARCHIVE "use archive file or device ARCHIVE"
/mnt/sdb5/backups/backup$(date '+%F_%H%I%S%P').tar.gz "location with time stamp"
/var/www "folder backup"
combine these 2 one-liners and you have your self a pretty good backup.

all that’s left to is add the lines to a cron job run the mysql one-liner at 11:30 and run the /var/www backup at midnight.