The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Cefiar <address@concealed>]

address@concealed wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions on how to back up the sympa mysql database?
>
> The automysqlbackup backup script looks like an easy choice.
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
> With instructions on usage at:
> http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/mysqlscript.htm
>
> It basically uses the syntax 'mysqldump > backupfile.sql'  but takes care of
> all the compression, rotation, and e-mailing logs.
>
> For backing up the sympa folders, it looks like we just need to do a tar of 
> the
> sympa home folder (either /home/sympa or /var/lib/sympa) and the sympa mail
> spool folder (/var/spool/mail/sympa )
>   

Note that rsnapshot is a very useful tool for this sort of thing, 
especially if you have enough disk space.

rsnapshot will either copy files (using rsync) from local or remote 
directories, or can run scripts. The scripts are expected to dump their 
data in the current directory, and in my case I dimply have a script 
that invokes mysqldump for each DB I want backed up.

As an added bonus, when using the rsync part, if you are using a 
filesystem that supports hardlinks (eg: ext3) then only ONE copy of the 
file will be kept, as long as it hasn't changed. This is also 
self-correcting (unlike incremental backups) where if the old 'snapshot' 
copy gets corrupted on-disk, it WILL create a new copy when backed up as 
it WILL be different from the corrupted copy.

Also note that where possible I suggest that ANY mysqldump you perform 
uses --complete-insert (-c) in it's command line, even though it 
produces bigger dumps. The reasoning for this is that you can simply 
extract a portion of your dump using standard text editing tools and 
reinsert it without worry caused by fields being created in the new 
database in the incorrect order to the dump, which makes correcting a 
few lost records a simple job. This also makes it MUCH easier to debug 
any problems you may have on re-creation/importing as well.

--
Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - address@concealed