Learning MySQL and MariaDB

Chapter 14. Backing Up and Restoring Databases

A database is often the culmination of the work of many people, sometimes thousands of people. The organization creating the database employs developers and administrators. Then there are people who contribute content, and who may be employees or members of the organization. But much of the content of a database can come from other people, such as clients, and unknown people providing content through a website. The amount of data can be enormous. It’s not unusual for even a small site to accumulate thousands of rows of data. A large site could easily have millions of rows of data. All of this content—all of this work from hundreds or thousands of people—can be lost easily, through something as simple as the failure of a hard drive on the server. Because of this, it’s essential to make backups regularly and correctly: too many and too much depend on it.

If you’re going to be a database administrator, you will need to understand how to make backups and restore them. You will need to develop a plan of what will be backed up, as well as when and where. In addition, you will need to check occasionally that backups are not failing. You shouldn’t wait until you need to restore data to find that the backups haven’t been working. And you will need practice restoring backups so that you will be ready when you need to quickly restore them. We will cover all of this in this chapter.

Making Backups

One of the best utilities you can use to make backup ...