There used to be a time when auto insurance was not mandatory:  some people would get it and others would not. When someone had an accident and they did not have insurance, that was when they would run out and purchase a little more. Yes, a bit chaotic, but oddly enough the idea of a solid dedicated server backup is too often viewed the same way.  Only after you have a disaster do you earnestly start looking at solutions, such as the R1soft backup system available at SingleHop.  You can roll the dice and go with an inferior free product, but why roll that dice when you can really have your cake and eat it too?  The R1soft Automatic back-up SingleHop solution has no monthly fees, just the charges for storage used.  Yes, with SingleHop you get Free R1soft!

I cannot think of a single reason why anyone with business data would not want backup services.  Heck, at home we make sure all of our pictures and important documents are stored off site, and this is not even mission-critical data!  Its loss would be sad for the Tremmel household, but this data will not impact an entire company.  Each one of us, companies and individuals, ought to do a self-evaluation on what would happen if we could not access critical data.  Go ahead, make a checklist of what info you simply cannot live without.  Once you are done, I think you will quickly accept that you need a powerful, solid, and thorough data backup solution.  And with Free R1Soft backup solutions, individual files, databases, database tables, directories, or even past versions of files can be restored at the click of a link inside of LEAP.  The easy access restoration system enables rapid replacement of lost or deleted files.  R1Soft’s automatic backup approach, which works seamless with the SingleHop LEAP systems, is what makes it the easiest, hassle-free software choice for this crucial data operation.

Today, do me a favor and think of the last time you did a backup or the times when you missed your backups, and if you really think hard you will come to the realization that it is time for a solid backup strategy. In fact, you are not doing me a favor, you are doing one for yourself by protecting your data with an easy-to-use automatic backup process.

Even with reliable software and competent users, there are still countless ways to lose or corrupt your MySQL data from your database server.  Fortunately, recovery is actually a straightforward process when you have reliable backups.

InnoDB has an automatic internal recovery system, which much of the time operates transparently.  In the case of database hosting failure, InnoDB attempts to fix it by running the log file from the last timestamp.  In many cases, it succeeds—during power failure or an operating system crash, for example, InnoDB itself takes care of recovering all the data.   But when InnoDB fails this automatic repair process, the entire database will not start.

It is important to schedule regular backups of your database.  The mysqldump utility is a helpful tool to make a backup of your data as a snapshot in a point of time.  Use this command to create a “dump file” of your MySQL database.

shell>  mysqldump --single-transaction --flush-logs --master data=2 \

            --all-databases > dump.sql

You can name the output file anything you want – here, it is dump.sql.  This file consists of the data, tables, and structures of all databases backed up into a SQL text file, dump.sql.

The option “–single-transaction” in the command above is specifically for InnoDB tables; it performs an online backup that takes no locks on tables.

To make incremental backups, however, you need to save incremental changes, a process best accomplished using the binary logs.  MySQL should always be started with the –log-bin option to enable that binary log.  In the mysqldump command above, the “–flush-logs” option causes the server to flush its logs.  You can flush the logs incrementally between dump backups to contain all the data changes made since that backup.

Now, suppose your database has a catastrophic crash.  It is simple to restore when you have regular backups as well as binary logs.  First, restore to the last full backup that you have.

shell>  mysql < dump.sql

The data is restored to the state that it was at your last mysqldump backup.  To restore the changes since then, use the incremental backups, from the binary log files which will be listed in the data directory of your MySQL server (here, logfilename-bin.000001 and logfilename-bin.000002).

shell>  mysqlbinlog logfilename-bin.000001 logfilename-bin.000002 | mysql