Now that I have bugzilla set up, my clients are starting to use it. It’s a very useful tool for logging bugs, feature requests and test results. The clients get kept up to date on what I’m doing, and I don’t have to remember every thing as it is all kept in the database.<\/p>\n
That means that the database has to be protected from loss or damage by taking regular backups.<\/p>\n
The bugzilla installation on my system uses MySql as the database engine, so I can take a backup of the entire bugzilla database by using the mysqldump command like this:<\/p>\n
\/usr\/local\/mysql\/bin\/mysqldump --user=bugzilla --password=******* bugzilla >backup.sql<\/pre>\nThat will create a human readable backup of the entire bugzilla database in the current directory.
\nTo save space I can pipe the output through gzip to create a compressed output, like this:<\/p>\n\/usr\/local\/mysql\/bin\/mysqldump --user=bugzilla --password=******* bugzilla | gzip >backup.sql<\/pre>\nI can give the file a more useful location, \u00a0by specifying an explicit path for the output file, and while I’m at it I can format the file name to include the date on which it was created like this:<\/p>\n
\/usr\/local\/mysql\/bin\/mysqldump --user=bugzilla --password=****** bugzilla | gzip >\/Users\/bz\/backups\/bugs_backup_`date +\\%Y-\\%m-\\%d`.sql.gz<\/pre>\nSo now I have a useful command that backs up the entire bugzilla database to a compressed file in a specific location, with a filename that includes the date of the backup. The output filename looks like this:<\/p>\n
bugs_backup_2013-11-20.sql.gz<\/pre>\nSo, now to get the command to run automatically at midnight every night, I edit the root user’s cron tab file by using: (* See note below about ‘su’)<\/p>\n
su\r\ncrontab -e<\/pre>\nand append this (all on one line) to the file:<\/p>\n
0 0 * * * \/usr\/local\/mysql\/bin\/mysqldump --user=bugzilla --password=****** bugzilla | gzip >\/Users\/bz\/backups\/bugs_backup_`date +\\%Y-\\%m-\\%d`.sql.gz<\/pre>\nNow my bugzilla database gets backed up every day at midnight.<\/p>\n
Simples!<\/p>\n