I’ve seen my fair share of clients that need basic MySQL backups but have no control panel or don’t want to bother with Control panel based backups. This is a really simple setup that lets you do DB backups and put them in a local directory of the server. It would likely be easily modified to rsync to another server as well if you wanted to. There are a ton of options that could be added to this, your imagination (and shell scripting capacity) are the only limitations. Some suggestions I have would be
-Mail on success or failure and on old file deletion
-Connect to a remote DB
-Monitor the overall size
Well enough with the abstract, on to the shell!
#!/bin/bash
date=`date +%Y%m%d`
mysqldump –all-databases > /mysqlbackups/mysql-$date.sql
find /mysqlbackups/ -atime +30 -delete
If you notice, this takes up all of 4 lines. The first one is the she-bang, the second is establishing the date time stamp, the third dumps the databases and the last one purges any old backups. The only real variable you have to change here is the “+30” so that it is the number of days you want to retain the backups for minus one.