Two of the most popular command line tools you can use to test your storage drive performance are hdparm or dd.
Hdparm is a nice tool focused specificaly on storage drives information and benchmarking. Read More
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A great benefit of the cloud servers is the easy scaling of resources up and down. But after scaling to a larger cloud machine and acquiring more storage space, you should extend the Linux partitions on it as well as the file system, in order to use that new space.
The tricky part here comes when you want to resize the root partition and some old methods included taking your server off, mounting the storage drive on another Linux machine and resizing the partitions. That of course is very inconvenient in the case of a production server and there are better ways to resize your root partition without having to take it offline.
This tutorial is to guide you on setting up a simple, automatic MySQL database backups using mysqldump and a cron job.
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Containers are a great tool for any scale, from a small dev environment set up on a cloud machine to a large and scalable applications infrastucture. The main benefits are the lightweight, fast and easy setup and the plenty of flexibility.
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For years on MySQL is one of the most popular database server. In this short article we’ll help setup your MySQL server on Ubuntu Server 16.04.
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This tutorial is to guide you on setting up a simple, automatic MySQL database backups using mysqldump and a cron job.
You can use the ‘mysqldump’ that comes in any standard MySQL installation to do a database dump from the shell. To backup the ‘exampledb’ database to a file do:
mysqldump -uroot -p exampledb > exampledb.sql
Note that there is no space between the ‘-u’ switch and the user (root). With the ‘-p’ switch and paramater after it the ‘mysqldump’ will prompt you to enter a password.
This command will output plain SQL queries in the exampledb.sql, but as they are text they can be compressed really good to save space. So to make a compressed backup, let’s do:
mysqldump -uroot -p exampledb | gzip > exampledb.sql.gz
You can use these commands to make manual backups of your databases. If you want to backup all databases on a server, use the ‘–all-databases’ switch instead of database name, like this:
mysqldump -uroot -p –all-databases| gzip > mysql_server.sql.gz
Now that you know how to make manual database backups, let’s automate them with a cron job. You must set up a cron job that calls the ‘mysqldump’ tool on a schedule.
First let’s make a directory for storing the backups:
mkdir /var/backups/mysql
As backups are more usefull when they provide history, let’s give the backup file with more meaningful name by adding the date and time when the backup was taken:
mysqldump -uroot -p exampledb | gzip > /var/backups/mysql/exampledb.$(date +”%Y_%m_%d_%I_%M”).sql.gz
To automate the backup process ‘mysqldump’ must have the user password inline, so it’s highly recommended to set up an additional database user specifically for backups.
Open a crontab editor:
crontab -e
and add the following line at the bottom:
0 1 * * * mysqldump -uroot -p exampledb | gzip > /var/backups/mysql/exampledb.$(date +”\%Y_\%m_\%d_\%I_\%M”).sql.gz
The “0 1 * * *” stands for a schedule on every 01:00 or everyday at one after midnight. The cron line format is “m h dom mon dow command”, where:
The ‘*’ symbol in any of these means “on every” minute, hour, day and so.
Saving the crontab will set your backup on schedule and you are good to go.