I’ve been wanting a simple way to make backups of the MySQL 3.x datafiles on Windows servers each night. So I found some things and cobbled together a solution for now that my be useful for you as well.
1. The server is NT4, which has the lousy “AT” command but I found that if you upgrade to IE5+ with the Offline Browsing pack, it installs the newer Task Scheduler service which is much much much better and easy to work with.
2. I installed blat, a command-line freeware email utility.
3. I wrote a batch file that:
- stops the mysql service
- xcopy’s the data to another drive and captures a log
- starts the mysql service
- emails me the log file
It’s low-tech, low-cost, and hopefully low-maintenance. It won’t help if the data in MySQL gets corrupted and I don’t notice for a day. But it should help in the event of a disk failure on the live drive. I still like the idea of continuous replication to a separate server for better coverage.
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