Re: [cobalt-users] Cobalt RaQ3 Backup

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Simon Pierce" <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
> I'm looking into backup options for our RaQ3 and have found the following
> instructions by browsing the list archive:
>
> 1)Telnet in and su to root.
>
> cd /etc
> tar cvfW /home/etc.tar .
</snip>

If done right, this method can be quite effective.  Another alternative is
to use the CMU tools.  See
http://www.cobalt.com/products/raq/migration.html.

> 2: I have mySQL and PHP4 installed. How would I go about backing up
> databases and anything else I may need to?

Use the program mysqldump which comes with MySQL.  It allows you to create
dump files for each database which consist of a series of SQL statements
which can be used to reconstruct the table format for the db tables and load
the table data.  To restore, it's as simple as doing "mysql <
mysql_dump_file".  There are other ways to backup your databases, but keep
in mind if you just copy the db files on the filesystem you should shutdown
MySQL first b/c if the tables are being written to when you do the copy,
your copies will be corrupted.  Another program you can use to do the
backups is mysqlhotcopy.  mysqldump has the advantage of creating a dump
format which is highly portable - you could restore to another RDBMS like
PostgreSQL or Oracle with only minor modification.  Database dumps are good
candidates for compression so you should consider using gzip to compress
them too to save space.

HTH,

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/