| Mysql Backups: Ghetto solution is to find a service that will allow you to rsync files to them and take care of offsite backups etc themselves. Once you have done that it's a simple case of setting up mysqldump to create timestamped .sql files and setting that up on a cron job to rsync to the remote server via SSH (you need to generate a key pair and copy the public key to the other end). If you are using characters from weird character sets you definitely want to make sure all of your unicode settings are correct which may take some trial and error and I've never entirely trusted mysql in this regard. If you are paranoid you should have a separate job that automatically downloads and restores your backups after a period of time and runs a few test queries on the data. Of course the hard part is knowing what the results of these queries should be. Of course the problem here is that this will chew up increasing amounts of your remote storage over time, so it depends if you can afford to delete backups of over a certain age. You can also enable binary logging in mysqld and do incremental backups by writing the binary log to the remote host at certain intervals (I think this only works properly with InnoDB databases), though I have no practical experience doing this because frankly I've never needed to. Nightly dumps were always good enough so my boss wouldn't want me spending any more time on it. That's the crux of the problem with working for a non tech company, most of the time once the solution is "ok" it's time to move onto something else so you never get a chance to really kick ass which is what you need to do to justify a high rate. These are really commodity skills though, you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did). Alternatively if you had posted "Mysql backup solution needed" on eLance you would have probably had at least 20 offers to do the whole thing for $20 or so. |
Could have. Didn't. Was too busy building my businesses to care to do the research. Many people are like me. Would listening to Jiggy teach me about MySQL in a nice, packaged, Jiggy-does-the-work-so-I-don't-have to format provide value? Yes, clearly. You already quintupled what I know about the subject with an HN post, think of how entertaining talking for an hour would be.
These are really commodity skills though... do the whole thing for $20 or so.
You are no longer a commodity after you've successfully convinced me that you are the expert who can e.g. listen to my particularized needs and tell me a solution which will work for them. In fact, even if I were non-technical and stark-raving insane and thought that $20 was a reasonable price to pay for this, the fact of having read the above would convince me that eLancelot wouldn't have his uni-codes sorted on the cronSyncServer or whatever that was, so I should entrust the future of my business to the guy who seems to know what he's talking about who is quoting numbers closer to what I pay for e.g. insurance than what I pay for toilet paper.