Update 2011-10-12: More storage options! Google Storage, Local HDD, FTP, experimental unlimited Google Docs conversion

Have you ever wanted to ensure that even if your server dies in the most spectacular of ways, your DB is safe? Meet Cloud Database Backup. Cloud Database Backup is a little script I’ve written that allows you to quickly and easily back up your MySQL DBs to the cloud.

Currently you can back your database up to:

• Amazon S3
• FTP
• Google Docs
• Google Storage
• Local HDD

Download the script here.

Requirements:

• MySQL with access to INFORMATION_SCHEMA database
• php, php5-cli (for S3 backups)
• python2, python-gdata (for Google Docs backups)

This is an updated version of my old Automatic MySQL Database Backup script that adds support for Google Docs (which now allows uploads of any file type for non-enterprise users), the recently opened Google Storage, as well as local HDD and FTP servers. It does a MySQL dump of each DB separately, zips them all and uploads the zip to your cloud service of choice.

I’ve also added in an experimental ‘db chunker’ which uses this script to split SQL dumps into convertible sizes for Google Docs, allowing you to upload unlimited backups for free; owever due to a reproducible bug in Google Docs, I wouldn’t recommend its use (and it’s disabled by default).

To get started simply update your details in the appropriate places at the top of backup.sh and type ./backup.sh. Presto!

I’ve also included a crontab example to allow automation of backups.

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A while back Samsung released a line of relatively cheap “EcoGreen” 2TB hard drives. Being the storage hungry IT nerd that I am, I picked up 2 of the things before finding out their firmware contains a known data write bug requiring a firmware patch best summed up with the following:

“It [the drive] will “forget” to write out its buffer if certan SMART commands are sent to the drive. This is the very definition of silent data corruption.”
– source

Samsung has released a patch but it requires booting into DOS which is incredibly difficult to do on todays floppyless PCs. After a bit of googling I came across the following two solutions to get the job done:

Bootable ISO image

This is the easier solution of the two but it is also the one that didn’t work for me. Michael has created a FreeDOS image with the patch merged in. For the download and installation details, see this post.

Bootable USB image

After trying and failing the above, I settled for a bootable USB image instead. User ZDOS has written up a handy tutorial here which I’ve detailed a bit more in depth below:

• Download the Windows 98 system files (at the top) and HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool from here and F4EG.exe from here.
• Install the HP Format Tool and run it with administrator privileges (right click – Run as Administrator).
• Extract the Windows 98 system files.
• With the HP Format Tool, format your USB drive (quick format should be enough) as Fat32 making sure you use the Windows 98 system files where it offers.
• Once done, copy F4EG.exe to your USB drive.
• Shutdown and unplug all HDDs besides your unpatched Samsung drive
• Boot your PC and enter the BIOS by pressing Delete during startup. Ensure that your HDDs are set to run in AHCI mode.
• Reboot either ensuring USB-HDD is selected as your top boot device or press F12 during startup to visit the One Time Boot Device page (results may vary – check your motherboard documentation).
• You should see a Windows 98 logo flash on the screen for a split second and then a command prompt. In the prompt type F4EG and press enter. Your drive should flash itself.

For plenty more useful information on this issue, I found this forum thread very helpful.

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One of my last niggling issues with Ubuntu 11.04 is, as you’d expect, another remnant of Unity carried over to the Ubuntu Classic desktop. This remnant is the notification area (or ‘Systray’ to you Windows converts) not allowing all applications access to it. Below is the line you’ll need for bringing Ubuntu back to the 21st century:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

Thanks to the good fellows at Web UDP8 for this little piece of magic.

PS. It appears the VLC icon STILL does not always appear. There’s a question posted on the VLC forums about this issue and it looks as though it’s due to an incompatibility between QT4 and Gnome. Stay tuned for further developments on this issue.

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It seems firefox 4 has stupidly removed the option to save tabs on exit however there’s a way to get this very useful functionality back. Here’s how:

1. Type about:config in the URL/Location/Address bar and press the Enter key
2. Accept the warning message (promise to be careful)
3. The preferences page/list will open
4. Filter = browser.tabs.warnOnClose
5. If its value is set to false, double-click on it (in the lower panel) to toggle its value to true
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for these following 3 preferences also:
   • browser.warnOnQuit
   • browser.warnOnRestart
   • browser.showQuitWarn

Taken from mozilla support. A big thank you to user Helper7677 for this solution!

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