Taking backup databases is a routine for every webmaster. Make your life a little easier by delegating this boring but extremely important chore to the shell script that will do this automatically and silently everyday, or whatever time you choose, for you

For automatic MySql database backup, please use following script to take backup using cron job by setting inside cPanel. Create a file named ‘db-backup.sh’ in home/cpanelUser/ with correct permissions/ownership.

Place this file on this location ‘/home/cPanel-User/db-backup.sh’ where cPanel-User is username of account.

Put the following code in the file db-backup.sh:

#/bin/bash
/usr/bin/mysqldump -–user=Database_User -–password=***** -–databases Database_Name | gzip > /home/cPanel-User/Database_Name-`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`.sql.gz

Where ‘Database_User’ is the database user, ‘Database_Name’ is the database name and ‘*****’ is the password of database user
+%Y%m%d%H%M is the time stamp,

The backup file will be created under directory “/home/cPanel-User/”.

Now, you need to add cron job. You can do it with the help of your control panel.

0 0 * * * /home/cPanel-User/db-backup.sh

Make sure you have permissions to run this script and you can test it by going to shell, and just run the script manually. If it runs successfully, you have your Database dump at the specified directory.

The above cron job will executes every day at 00:00 hour and creates backup file for your MySQL Database.

How to Exclude specific table from MySQL Dump script using –ignore-table option

There will be times when you do not want one or some of the tables from the database(s) not to be included in the backup dump, You can easily exclude them from the dump by adidng following Option:

--ignore-table database_name.table_name

By adding ignore table option, your backup dump script will become:

#/bin/bash
/usr/bin/mysqldump -–user=Database_User -–password=***** -–databases Database_Name --ignore-table database_name.table_name | gzip > /home/cPanel-User/Database_Name-`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`.sql.gz

Running a .sh: Permission Denied Error

If you have uploaded db-backup.sh as suggested in this article, there’s good chance that you will run into this “Permission Denied” error if you invoke the script manually from shell. Just type in the following command and chmod db-backup.sh after logging into shell:

chmod +x /home/cPanel-user/db-backup.sh

Now run the script again mamnaully by following :

/home/cPanel-User/db-backup.sh

And this will definitely create the backup dump.

Hope that helps.

Related posts:

1. Copying files from remote server to another server through SSH
2. Ten Step Guide to Install Redmine project management application

For any webmaster, switching web server is a nightmare, especially when there is large number of files to move to a new server. After some bitter experiences, I have found out following methods to move your data files and database quickly and painlessly from one server to another. I’m sure these SSH commands will save your day.

These methods will copy/get that data files and database from your old server say Server A to new server say Server B without downloading anything to your PC. This way you will save some bandwidth and valuable time, and lot of anxious moments while your huge files are being uploaded when after lot of waiting and whining all you see is ‘script timed out’ message.

I’m assuming here that you have SSH access to your servers.

For data files, what I usually do is that I tar the files because file permissions are preserved and kept intact on the new server. First login through SSH to the Server A where your files are located.

Here are the commands:

cd /home/username-of-your-account/public_html
  tar -cvf backup-website.tar ./

Once it’s done, go to your new server say Server B and login through SSH:

Here are the commands:

  cd /home/ username-of-your-account /public_html
  wget your-old-domain.com/backup-website.tar
  tar -xvf backup-website.tar

That’s it. One caveat here for extraction of tar file if you are logged in as root user. If you have any cPanel or HSphere panel available, you should use that to extract the tar file.

So either log in with your account user name or If you do extract the tar file with the root user, you probably want to check and make sure the correct owner and group are on your files you just extracted. You can check to see what they are by typing:

ls -la

If the owner or group is wrong you can run this to change the owner:

chown -R owner.group ./

owner.group should be replaced with the owner name you want and the group name you want. This will recursively go through all your files and directories and changed them to the correct owner and group. One warning here, this command can change the owner and group for all of your files located on new server and can bring down your new server before even getting started. If the file permissions are not correct, you will see Forbidden error so only run this command “chown“ if you are really sure what you are doing. So be very careful for this command.

It would be far better and safer to extract the tar file using cPanel File Manager or logging in SSH with the hosting account name.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. how to unzip files on remote server using PHP script
2. Backup your MySQL databases automatically with cron job
3. Ten Step Guide to Install Redmine project management application