I’ve been using my Cloud Database Backup script for a few months now for weekly scheduled backups of my MySQL databases to Google Docs. Everything has been going smoothly, however I’m starting to run low on quota. For this reason I decided to look into splitting the SQL dumps into chunks small enough to be convertible and doing an upload-convert rather than a zip upload which will result in literally unlimited, quote free database backups as frequently as I like! The focus of this post though is the actual splitting script which splits a given MySQL dump into chunks of x characters.

As always, download it here.

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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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I installed firefox-4.0 (currently 4.0b8pre) on Ubuntu Maverick RC earlier today and all was going fine and dandy until I had to open a Google Docs spreadsheet. I’d receive a message stating:

The bad news is that Google Docs has just encountered an error.
The good news is that you've helped us find a bug, which we are now looking into.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
In the meantime, if you'd like updates on this and other issues, try visiting the Google Docs Help Forum.

Sorry, and thanks for your help!
- The Google Docs Team

I checked documents and they seemed to be fine. It turns out this is an issue with Google not recognising FF4’s user agent string. The easiest way to solve this issue is to type about:config into the address bar and set

general.useragent.compatMode.firefox

to true.

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