[Opensim-users] Database backups, recommended methods

[Edmund Edgar]

On 9 June 2011 13:16, missyfitz <7minarets at gmail.com> wrote:
> So is it safe to just backup the database file itself?

This can be done, but you'll need to have locked the database to
prevent changes and flush outstanding changes to disk before you do it
to be sure you have a workable backup. (Stopping the mysql server will
achieve the same effects.) If you don't do this, there may be changes
that are stored in RAM but haven't yet been flushed to disk.

Also, you'll probably want to make sure you restore to the same
version of MySQL, unless you want your life to be needlessly
interesting.

People do sometimes do this for very big databases - one client I
worked with had a database close to 1TB, which would have taken too
long to run with mysqldump. Since it's not usually practical to lock
your production database every night to do a backup, the usual
solution is to replicate the master database to a slave database, stop
the slave, do the backup, and start it again and let it catch up with
the master again. On Linux, there's a thing called an LVM snapshot
that will help you minimize the time you have to stop the slave.
There's also a tool called mylvmbackup to help you with this process.

But unless you have a very big database or some other special
requirements, you're almost definitely better off using mysqldump.

-- 
Edmund Edgar
Founder, KK Social Minds
Educational Technology for the Web and Virtual Worlds

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