After my last harddrive purchase I explained to my wife how much space I would have (note to self, don’t do that again), she asked “Does that mean you have enough room for the kids games, so we can get rid of their computer?”.

Of course I answer too quick for my own good “Oh yeah sure”. What was I thinking? They might infect it with thier harsh treatment of shutting down improperly, constantly reinstalling programs, and of course they’re DOS based games! But it was too late, I had said yes, and if it weren’t for my oldest I’d be sunk.

He spoke up (I think he suffers the same quick to comment problem I have) and said “We barely even use it anymore, so we don’t need to use your computer dad”.

Sweet, totally off the hook and I have a spare computer to boot!

So what to do, what to do?

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Alright, I think I have it (I’m just waiting to make sure cron fires off and runs everything)! It’s very simple, and probably pretty dirty - but hey I’m not a whiz with shell scripting, nor cron so I think what I have is pretty sweet.

Because I’m lazy (I’m a programmer!) and I know I wouldn’t remember to run backups in an normal fashion, I wanted to make a system to run them automatically, think set it and forget it (wait wasn’t that an infomercial of some type?). So without further adieu…

The Shell script:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
mysqldump --opt -uUsername -pPassword --all-databases >
~/db_backup_tmp/all-db-backup.sql &&
mv ~/db_backup_tmp/all-db-backup.sql ~/db_backup/all-db-backup.sql

The PHP script:

$file = "~/mysql_backup.sh";
exec($file);

Calm down, I’ll explain it…

So first we have the shell script.

#!/bin/sh

From Wiki

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Granted, I’m not trying to sound like a smarty pants here because I really know absolutely nothing about cron and how it works.

So let’s start from the beginning (moves hands to symbolize starting a flash back sequence)

From Wiki

In computing, cron is a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name is derived from Greek chronos (??????), meaning time.

cron has been recreated several times in its history.

Say you want something to automatically run on your server (linux/unix) at certain timed intervals, and example would be, oh say a backup or other routines that need to be run at certain intervals. On a Drupal site I run, they have a built in script to update things using cron. It will update a list of rss feeds and other routine maintenance items. So I first started out with looking at the Drupal site for any documentation (shhhh, it’s not like I asked a guy for directions) on how to set it up. There were plenty of examples shown, but didn’t make a whole of sense to me.

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