monline

I was given the task to write a script that makes daily backups of our company's MySQL databases and keeps only the most recent <n> of them (where <n> is a positive integer ). This is not a big deal for anyone with some knowledge of shell scripting, but I publish it nonetheless, because I think the implementation is quite nice and might spare some minutes/hours for beginners.

The script uses zsh (the shell of my choice), but most of it would work in Bash, too. You should run it from crontab on a daily basis, which means you have to:

1. place the attached mysql_backup.zsh in a directory of your choice (eg. ${HOME}/bin)
2. open the script in a text editor (eg. vi) and add the necessary "do_backup" commands with the necessary parameters for backing up your databases
3. extract your current crontab with something like crontab -l > .crontab
4. add a new line to the end of ".crontab" with this: 0 3 * * * ${HOME}/bin/mysql_backup.zsh
5. overwrite the crontab settings with crontab .crontab

That's all.

Attachment	Size
mysql_backup-1.0.0.zsh	1.42 KB
mysql_backup-1.1.0.zsh	1.7 KB
mysql_backup-1.2.0.zsh	2.33 KB
mysql_backup-1.3.0.zsh	2.38 KB
mysql_backup-1.4.0.zsh	2.38 KB
mysql_backup-1.5.0.zsh	2.51 KB
mysql_backup-1.6.0.zsh	2.66 KB