Backing Up Your Web sites that utilize databases

[jaidai]

Do you backup your databases? If not, you should or you are setting yourself up for a tearful reality. Databases are not 100% stable and are subsceptible to shutting down or being corrupted. Therefore, you should always consider backing up your database (the technical term for this is running cron jobs)

At the very minimum, you should backup your database once a week, eventhough I suggest once a day.

If you use wordpress it comes with an installed plugin (version 2.0 and above) that will send a database dump to your email account regularly.

Some applications, like wordpress, allow provide you with a database backup utility.

If you use other database applications and have cpanel, cpanel allows you to backup your database.

If you use other database applications and do not have cpanel, there are options you can use to back up the database.
1. MyBackup: http://www.tufat.com/s_mybackup_web_dat ... porter.htm (we use this one)

2. http://www.webbasedcron.com/
This is hosted cron job service - $16 a year.

Also, you should always have a backup of your web site files as well.

[83camaro]

I back up every day on some of my database only sites. I just slapped together a little bit of php code to back it up and create a duplicate db. Runs on cron job at 3am and sends me an email to confirm that it has been done. Some of the sites, I actually pull data from localhost (apache, xaamp) and post it to the net and do a local cron job on my home pc.

[Lynn Terry]

[jaidai]

Wordpress 2.0 (and above) have automaticly added the WordPress Database Backup plugin to the Wordpress' plugin section.

Activate this plugin and designate an email addresss for it to run cron jobs every night. What will happen is every night it will backup your database and send to the sql file to whatever email address you designated.

Very convienent!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that you have to also install the wp-cron plugin found at skippy.net. When you combine this plugin with the pre installed WP backup database plugin, you database will automaticly be backup every night at 12am.