Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

How I backup my database

Sep292011

I run several WordPress sites on my servers, including this blog, which has content going back over 10 years. While I’m not too worried about backing up all the files (I can always install a fresh copy of WordPress on a new server and be up and running quickly, sans old images and such), my content is quite precious to me.

For a long time, I ran a nightly perl script which dumped my databases into a file, compressed them, then emailed them to my GMail account. And this served me well for several years. Until the size of my database dump grew larger than the 10MB attachment size limit on GMail. So for a while there, while I had local database dumps, I didn’t have offsite backup.

I finally got around to doing something about it.

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