Cron jobs for backups
October 28, 2007Since I’ve lost some of my work (read about it) I have been thinking about automatic backups. A quick look in my controlpanel showed me that I was able to make jobs for Cron, a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems.
Since I have one main domain and two subdomains I figured it would be nice to have one backup with all the files and one with all the databases. Unfortunately due to the nature of the PLESK controlpanel I was forced to use a file backup script and a database backup script for each domain. I’m still thinking about ways to combine all three sites, but I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to do so. 
Nevertheless I managed to setup the cron jobs and now a daily dump of each database is send to my Gmail account. The file structure for each site is send on a weekly basis. Some might wonder why I use a Gmail acount. Well, there are several reasons for this: 1) in the last issue I had my normal e-mail was also reset to a previous state; 2) lot’s of space (around 4.5 gigabyte of storage).
While I was updating stuff on the FTP I also updated to WordPress 2.3.1, as well as some new plugins. I love the notification of new plugin versions in WordPress. It makes keeping the blog up to date so much easier.
In addendum: most of the backups went like planned. However,
Dennis | October 30, 2007In addendum: most of the backups went like planned. However, for one site no backups were produced. I’ve tracked the problem down, the file permissions of the PHP files I use for the Cron job were not correct.
They need at least a 755 permission to be working well. As of tonight all backups were delivered in my inbox as intended.
[...] some of you might remember October 16th and the
.::Schonhose.nl::. » Backup-issues | January 27, 2008[...] some of you might remember October 16th and the backup scheme I installed following that dreadful day. I set up cronjobs and mailed the zipfiles to a Gmail [...]