Database backups with PHP

CheersMate

I'm currently writing a little application in PHP, and want to be able to provide a system for backing up the MySQL database.

The problem is, I can't find any information on it - anywhere! The nearest solution I've found is to use PHPMyAdmin to do the job, but that's not really what I want. I'd like to incorporate the backup function into MY application, rather than having to use another external one.

I could take a look at PHPMyAdmin's code, and try and work out which bit does what, and how - but that's a lot of hard work! :p

Does anyone know of a better solution for backing up an entire database?

steadyguy

For MySQL 3.23.25 and newer, you can use
BACKUP TABLE table_1[, table_2, table_3, ...] TO '/path/to/backup/dir';

And to restore a backup made this way:
RESTORE TABLE table_1[, table_2, table_3, ...] FROM '/path/to/backup/dir';

If the tables are being created and dropped between backups, then you'd have to write a function to make a list of tables, but that's much easier than rewriting phpMyAdmin 😃

CheersMate

Thanks - that looks good.

But what I was hoping for was something that would then save the database backup directories as a zip file.

Any ideas as to how I might go about doing this?

Tim_L

You could try:

mysqldump -h{host} -u{user} -p -B{database} > backupfile

or take a look at this perl script:

http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=169226

HTH...

steadyguy

There are is a PHP library that will allow you to read .zip files, but not write ... there are libraires for .gz (Zlib), and .bz2 (Bzip2) ... The manual has their documentation.

Hope that helps.