Automatic offsite Wordpress backups

Yesterday, I decided to set up a an automated backup solution for my site here.  Basically, it does an sqldump then sends the dump to another server over SCP.

First, I had to enable SSH login without a password in order for SCP to work in a cronjob.  I followed this howto and it worked perfectly.

Then, I created a backup script to be called by cron:

#!/bin/sh

cd /home/backups/collegegeek

FNAME=collegegeek-`date +%F`.sql

mysqldump –add-drop-table -uroot -pPASSWORDHERE collegegeek > $FNAME
bzip2 $FNAME
rm $FNAME
scp $FNAME.bz2 zach@192.168.1.82:backups/
echo “Nightly Backup Successful: $(date)” >> /home/backups/blogbackup.log

This will also leave a copy on the local server on the /home partition.  Note that /home is on a different physical drive than /var, so if the drive with the SQL database goes down, I should have a local copy as well.

Posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Under: Blog, Linux, Tech | No Comments »

Using VMware to Build and Run XP Embedded

XP Embedded Studio isn’t actually a horrible application at it’s core.  Now, the user interface and documentation are God-awful, which is why I’m writing this post.  As you saw in my last two entries, I’ve been working with XPe for the last few days, and there has been plenty of frustration to go along with it.  What should have been a fifteen minute task wound up taking several days.  However, one week and a few dozen BSODs later, I present this how to:
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Posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Under: Blog, Microsoft, VMware | No Comments »