How to Crontab

Hi,

I want to use crontab to make daily backups of my mysql database.

But, I don’t want it to overwrite the old file.

How do I auto number the files I’m creating ?

Backup - mysqldump database_name -u user_name -ppassword > SQL_Back_XX

Where xx will increment one after another.


Thanks !

Low.

This is really a Unix shell-scripting issue, not a database one, but one quick way to handle this would be to use dates:

mysqldump database_name -u user_name -ppassword > SQL_Back_`date +%Y_%m_%d`

Note: the single quotes in this are backquotes (the top left key over the Tab). This means that the command inside the quotes is executed, and the result is returned as a string. So, your backup files would look like

SQL_Back_2003_08_05
SQL_Back_2003_08_06
SQL_Back_2003_08_07

etc...

You could also add minutes to this if you want several backups a day:

mysqldump database_name -u user_name -ppassword > SQL_Back_`date +%Y_%m_%d_%M`

There are many combinations you can do if you play with the date formatting options. Do a 'man date' for more info.

Thanks, Helped a bunch.