[rt-users] Headsup! Mysql 3.23.x Instability (AKA: Keep Backups!)

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Tobias Brox wrote:
> > As a hedge against a recurrence, I've turned on mysql's update logging
> > by adding the "--log-update" flag to my mysql start script.
> This will capture
> > all database changes in the event that I ever have to replay
> transactions.
>
> Oh, yeah - that's generally a very good tip anyway.  Ironically, I'm
> living together with some friends - one of them is a system administrator
> at a web hosting firm which use mysql extensively to everything.  We
> started talking about backups, and I told him how nice the logging
> possibilities in mysql are, and particularly the update log, and told him
> that it was very important to have this one turned on for backup purposes.
>

At our work the CVS repositories are backed up rigorously, but other
stuff like MySQL is sometimes given a lower priority (if they are
on development servers for example).

A neat trick is to put a mysqldump into CVS, and then CVS commit the
updated MySQL dump bi-daily ... it diff's very well indeed since its
all largely text, and you can pull out old copies of the database
quite easily from the cvs at any time ... saves keeping old full
dumps in backups as you can just backup the repository and have full
history available at any time for recreation.

Anil