Hi George, everybody!
George Larson wrote: > We do nightly backups at work just by taring the mysql directory. In > my environment, that is /var/lib/mysql. > > Like this: > > service mysql stop > cd /var/lib/mysql > rm -rf * ^^^^^^^^ For your own benefit, I hope you don't do that on the machine on which the (primary) DB server is installed. > tar zxvf file.tar > rm -rf ib_logfile* > chown -R mysql.mysql > service mysql start The above procedure may work on a backup machine, to which you transfer a "file.tar" which contains a database snapshot. So it is a recovery/ restore procedure, not the save/backup part. Assuming the data are below /var/lib/mysql on the broken machine, and that disk is mounted as /mnt, this would be like: cd /mnt/var/lib/mysql tar czvf /tmp/file.tar . Take care not to damage that disk, or to use it for any other purpose, until you have verified that your new database server could successfully read and use all those data (do thorough checks!), and taken a full new backup from it. In general, I do not recommend to use file backups for a database, but rather to use the database means (backup, dump, ...). However, after your database machine broke, this isn't so easily possible. > > Something similar might work for you. Somebody with more MySQL > expertise than me can probably help you customize the process to your > environment. To the original poster: I know it sounds very hard and seems to ignore your trouble, but still: A typical reply in DB support is "If you have no backup, your data obviously are not important." Everything can fail, both hard- and software: if your data are valuable, you need a backup which is separated from the machine your data are on. "Separated" might be an external disk that gets switched off, a tape that is removed from its drive, another machine, just anything that won't suffer even if your database server breaks terribly. (To prevent questions: Mirrored disks or RAID systems are no backup, as they are not separated.) If backup is to external disk, my personal policy is to have at least two of these, used in alternation: If total disaster strikes while one is mounted and being written to, and that disaster affects all mounted disks (data and current backup), I still have the previous backup. Given current disk prices, one sleepless night will cost you more than the second disk. How often you do this backup is a decision you have to make yourself, based on your update frequency and the possibility/cost to repeat the changes that occurred since the last backup. Regards, Jörg -- Joerg Bruehe, MySQL Build Team, joerg.bru...@oracle.com ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG, Komturstrasse 18a, D-12099 Berlin Geschaeftsfuehrer: Juergen Kunz, Marcel v.d. Molen, Alexander v.d. Ven Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRA 95603 -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
