On 9 June 2011 13:16, missyfitz <[email protected]> wrote: > So is it safe to just backup the database file itself?
This can be done, but you'll need to have locked the database to prevent changes and flush outstanding changes to disk before you do it to be sure you have a workable backup. (Stopping the mysql server will achieve the same effects.) If you don't do this, there may be changes that are stored in RAM but haven't yet been flushed to disk. Also, you'll probably want to make sure you restore to the same version of MySQL, unless you want your life to be needlessly interesting. People do sometimes do this for very big databases - one client I worked with had a database close to 1TB, which would have taken too long to run with mysqldump. Since it's not usually practical to lock your production database every night to do a backup, the usual solution is to replicate the master database to a slave database, stop the slave, do the backup, and start it again and let it catch up with the master again. On Linux, there's a thing called an LVM snapshot that will help you minimize the time you have to stop the slave. There's also a tool called mylvmbackup to help you with this process. But unless you have a very big database or some other special requirements, you're almost definitely better off using mysqldump. -- Edmund Edgar Founder, KK Social Minds Educational Technology for the Web and Virtual Worlds [email protected] +81 090 3912 3380 Skype: edmundedgar Second Life: Edmund Earp Linked In: edmundedgar Twitter: @edmundedgar http://www.socialminds.jp _______________________________________________ Opensim-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
