Waking up in Geelong

I run this blog with WordPress – today it powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet. I use a shared hosting account to run the site so I have total control, but it also means I need to make sure everything gets backed up regularly so if my hosting provider derails it, I can quickly get things… back on track.

The easiest way to backup a self-hosted WordPress blog is by using the “WP-DBManager” plugin – install it via the control panel, tick a few boxes, and a backup of your entire database gets sent to you via email every night, giving you a way to get your website content back if something goes wrong.

For me WP-DBManager did everything it promised, at least until my hosting provider changed their security settings and disabled a number of functions that the backup plugin needed to work, leaving me with a failing backup job and this error message:

Checking PHP Functions (passthru(), system() and exec()) …
passthru() disabled.
system() disabled.
exec() disabled.

I’m sorry, your server administrator has disabled passthru(), system() and exec(), thus you cannot use this backup script. You may consider using the default WordPress database backup script instead.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realise my backups weren’t working until a few weeks after the server config change was made, when I discovered that my nightly emails only contained an empty backup file!

With the easy to use WP-DBManager option ruled out, I turned to a cron job – a small program that runs on your server, based on a regular schedule you define. Thankfully someone had already come up with a script to do just what I wanted to do – you can find his instructions at http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/cron/.

Once I added the above cron job to my server I ran into a major issue – the ‘mutt’ command for sending email was not available to me, so I needed to jump into the world of shell scripting to find another way to do the same thing. This is the replacement script I came up with:

#Set the 4 variables
#Replace what is AFTER the = with the information from your wp-config.php file
#That's your information on the right okay ?

DBNAME=DB_NAME
DBPASS=DB_PASSWORD
DBUSER=DB_USER

#Keep the " around your address
EMAIL="[email protected]"

DATE=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`
PARTDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

mysqldump -u $DBUSER -p$DBPASS $DBNAME > $DBNAME-$DATE.sql
gzip $DBNAME-$DATE.sql
uuencode $DBNAME-$DATE.sql.gz $DBNAME-backup-$DATE.sql.gz | mail -s "MySQL backup for $PARTDATE" $EMAIL
rm $DBNAME-$DATE.sql.gz

My shell script does much the same thing as the original script I based it upon, except that the email you get isn’t anywhere as nice looking – just a subject line and an attached backup file.

Fill in your own values for the first four variables, save the script as a file, and then follow the instructions back at http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/cron/ to get it running as a Cron job on your own server.

I setup my backups to run once daily, and since I’ve set it up the emails have been successfully arriving in my inbox, with a gzipped SQL script as the attachment. Let’s hope I never have a need to restore them!

And a sidenote…

The derailed V/Line train picture above was the aftermath of a tree falling over the tracks at Stonyford, Victoria back in 2009. No-one was killed or seriously injured when the leading locomotive ended up sideways, with the second locomotive and a few of the carriages coming off the rails – more details in the accident investigation report.

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