The following guide provides a walk-through for setting up automatic backups of your mySQL databases using the AutoMySQLBackup file bash script. After reading the guide, it should be quick and easy to implement. This is an indispensable tool for webmasters. Once the backup system is in place you’ll have daily, weekly and monthly backups of your mySQL databases neatly organized in a private folder on your web server. They are automatically rotated so that they don’t eat up your storage space. Anytime you download a backup of your home directory all of the database backups will be included. This is much better than creating manual backups and can be a huge time saver if you have multiple databases.

Prologue

If you already know why you should be backing up your databases and want to skip ahead to the actual tutorial. Websites based on any type of content management system are pretty much guaranteed to be database driven. It is assumed that most people running their websites on virtual or dedicated servers already have a backup system in place and know how to set this up. If you are reading this tutorial, chances are you are using a shared hosting provider with a LAMP configuration (Linux Apache MySQL PHP). It is also likely that you have CPanel for site administration.

Reasons why automatic database backup is a good idea

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1. Get the script: AutoMySQLBackup is a wonderful tool that can be downloaded for free. The first thing you need to do is get yourself a copy. Download AutoMySQLBackup.
2. Configure the script: The next step is configuring AutoMySQLBackup before uploading it to your server. You can edit the script using any text editor. Take note – Windows Notepad has terrible formatting for these kinds of files. It is better to use a dedicated text editor. If you don’t have a decent text editor, check out the freeware program PSPad, which also has some really cool tools for working with other files such as CSS, XTHML, PHP etc.
   Once you have the AutoMySQLBackup script open for editing, you’ll need to set the parameters. There are a lot of configuration options, but I am just going to focus on the important settings that will be applicable to most users.

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