Dump MySQL databases, compress & encrypt them, and upload to Dropbox for a simple off-site backup. Backups are kept for 7 days.
mysql-dropbox-backup is a simple shell script that will use mysqldump to dump all of your MySQL databases, omitting any that you specify, add them to a compressed and encrypted tarball, and upload them to Dropbox for a simple off-site backup solution. By defauly it will also dump the MySQL user table. The script makes use of the Dropbox-Uploader project by Andrea Fabrizi. Run it as a daily cron job to keep 7 days of backups. On each run it will try to delete the backup taken 7 days ago.
- cURL
- OpenSSL
- A Dropbox account
- Dropbox-Uploader
Most Linux systems will come with cURL and OpenSSL installed. Dropbox gives away 2GB of storage for free.
First grab a copy of Dropbox-Uploader, follow its installation instructions, and link it to your Dropbox account. I have it installed in my home directory, but it can reside elsewhere.
Next get a copy of mysql-dropbox-backup.sh and mysql-dropbox-backup.cf, and save them in the same directory as dropbox_uploader.sh.
Edit mysql-dropbox-backup.cf to add your MySQL connection details.
Edit the top section of mysql-dropbox-backup.sh to give it your MySQL config file location, your chosen encryption password for your backup file, and edit the list of ignored databases if you wish. You can also choose whether to dump the MySQL user table or not.
mysql-dropbox-backup is run from the CLI, taking no parameters.
Ideally it be run as a daily cron job. After uploading the present backup, it will attempt to delete the backup from 7 days previous, so that only one week of backups are retained.
./mysql-dropbox-backup.sh
The script is quite verbose and will output which databases were backed up and the names of any files generated etc...
In the unfortunate event that you need to use a backup, it can be decrypted and the tarball expanded as follows, once downloaded from Dropbox:
openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -iter 30 -in <backup-file.tar.gz.enc> | tar xz
Then the SQL files will be available to restore within the resulting directory.