Small Step in Progress

elorg — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:30:37 +0000

Last night I was determined to make some progress on my site – no matter how small. I decided that I wanted to learn how to use cron and mysqldump to schedule automated backups of the databases that I’m using (just in case). This will come in handy in case something happens to the server while I’m on vacation later this year.

Both utilities are pretty straightforward and easy to use. With the help of man pages, google, and some insight from the bf, I was able to get it working. Thanks to help from my buddy Mark, I was able to get the backup files to be dynamically named so I can have multiple backups saved in the same folder.

The only big snag I ran into was the password. Apparently when using the mysqldump command you can’t have a $ in the user’s password. It thinks that it’s a variable or wildcard or something and gives you access denied. Run it manually with just the -p switch or remove the $ from the password, and it works just fine.

Mission accomplished. Progress was made. Maybe that will motivate me to make more progress.

elorg.net » code

Small Step in Progress