Setup Backup
Every system should have backups. In case of emergency, backup are very useful. Your backup can save you hours of downtime with a minimum impact.
There's is some tools you can use to back up your entire system or your most important files.
tar
, gzip
, bzip2
, dump
and rsync
are some tools you can use to back up files and folders.
automysqlbackup
is a tool to backup your MySQL databases.
Example backup
Here's an example of a folder backup including all the sub-folders and files within.
tar -cvf archive-name.tar dir1 dir2 dir3....
Now, let's compress it:
gzip -9 archive-name.tar
You can use bzip2
instead. bzip2 has a better compression rate but is a little slower.
To combine both command, you can use the -z
option.
dump
dump
is written specifically for backups. It backs up the entire file system and allows multiple levels of backups. The corresponding restore
command allows for restore from a dump backup.
For example, to back up /boot file system:
dump 0zf backup.boot /boot
Backup MySQL
There's an easy command to back up MySQL databases. automysqlbackup
can automatically make daily, weekly, and monthly backups of your MySQL database.
Install
sudo aptitude install automysqlbackup
Configure Backup
sudo vi /etc/default/automysqlbackup
All the backup are stored in the /var/lib/automysqlbackup
by default. It is recommended to change this folder. To change the default backup folder, edit the file and modify the BACKUPDIR=
to the new location.
You can also receive an email if there's an error while running the backup. To do this, you need to change the MAILADDR=
and add your email address.
Backup Home Folder
You can back up your entire home folder using the zip
command. If you want to exclude some folder, you need to use the --exclude
parameter.
zip -r myzipbackup.zip * --exclude=access_log --exclude=public_ftp --exclude=tmp