Regarding CRONJOB/MYSQLDUMP Questions

camarosource

I have 6 questions regarding CRONJOB & MYSQLDUMP: Heavens for bid :-)

My host allows you to use it's CRONJOB feature on your control panel. I would like to use the CRONJOB to back up one of my MYSQL Databases. I would like to test it out as I also have a script that will eventually email me it. But in order to test it out, I need to be here to see if it works. I need to specify the time, date, month, hour, etc into CRONJOB to schedule when to run it's task. I am in UTC-8:00 Pacific Standard Time. HOW do I know what the SERVER's time is since they are not using the same time region as me.

Let's say it's 12:35pm right now and I would like the CRONJOB to run at 12:40pm so I can watch if it worked or not.. HOW would I do with (with their time region being different than mine, and how would I know what TIME their server is)?

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD --database DATABASENAME > top50list_nightly_backup.sql

WHERE would this file be placed on my server? (Need to know exactly the path from my domain so this php script will be able to locate it and email me the file). If you say "root directory" I don't know what you mean. I've seen in the message board /home/username/ but there is no "home" when I FTP.. only a "www" "public_htmls" ""mail" etc.. and two files in the "/" directory (one being a temo file)

I read this in another form. "And don't forget to run your cron job at a time when few users will be using your system, and to use the lock-tables option of mysqldump, to make sure you're getting "frozen" data, you don't want your data to have any chance of being in flux while in the process of being backed up."

What exactly do they mean by using the locking tables option? What option command is this?

I see SOME are using a certain command on their MYSQLDUMP command line while others don't.. why? The command is "--opt".

Another bit of information I read in another form "mysqldump can have problems with certain kinds of BLOB columns,". BLOB problems? What's this? What does this mean to me if I am backing up my message board and top 50 list database?

Someone had mentioned that MYSQLDUMP only backs up info in the databases that are FROZEN (??). What's this mean? They said it doesn't back up files that are in memory that may be temporarily put at the time of running the MYSQLDUMP program. If this is true, will this mean if I were to back up, say my message board and people are online. Let's say my database is deleted (or whatever.. basically just need to restore from my backup created by MYSQLDUMP), will my restored database be corrupted because some files in use were not backed up?

Please help me since I am completely new at this whole thing. I very much appreciate each and everyone of you who replies.

Thanks,

Paul

Anon

#/bin/sh
DATE=date +%m_%d_%y
FILENAME=/home/yourfolder/sql_back/file_com-$DATE.sql
mysqldump -u <user> -p<pass> db>$FILENAME

this is the script i use on nighly basis.. if it helps.

Anon

Hi,

As for the time information I suggest you contact your hosting company and ask what time zone the server is in and what the exact time on the server is when you call. You can use this information to select the proper PST time.

As for the cron information I also suggest you contact your hosting company the places where you enter this information will vary.

As for the mysqldump command all information can be found at www.mysql.org.

Later
- Justin