backup

This how-to shows you an easy way to backup and then restore your thunderbird data including your emails

It is a good idea to backup from time to time your data, and maybe some of our most valuable data now a days are our emails, and email addresses.

And yes there are a lot of on-line applications that may take care about that, like plaxo or gmail I prefer to have all that in my PC with my favorite email client which is Thunderbird

Today I will show you which steps you need to backup and then restore to the same machine or to another one your Thunderbird data.

As I was trying to find an easy way to backup a MySQL database with no ssh access to the server, there should be better ways, but i found this easy one.

You will need a Shell script, a .php script.

Ok, lets make this work

MySQL is one of the most used Databases in Linux, (if not the most).

It is a great Database engine, but anyway it could have problems, or your server, if it goes out of power for instance, you could loose a lot of data, so backing up is always a good idea.

A good command for doing this is mysqldump, this is a Linux shell mysql command, so you may need ssh access to the server to run it. (Later I will publish a php version of this)

What mysqldump really does is to create a script with the structure and the data to create and populate a "restored" Database with the data of the "backed up" Database

So let's go to the How To.

With this shell script you can choose at your discretion to use ftp (ncftpput) or ssh (scp) to move your backup files to another server, you can get this script run on a cron job for automatic backup, it also uses tar command to compress your files, before copying them.

To be almost 100% that your data is secure, and I said almost because you are never 100% secure!
Ok, Here we will see how to use together ssh (scp) and duplicity to encrypt your backed up data and to copy it to another server using an encrypted tunnel.

If you have two servers, could be a good idea to make cross backups of the important data, so if any of them fails you can always restore from the other.

Here we will use rsync and ssh to make this possible, rsync is used to sync files between folders on the same machine or between machines, ssh will open an encrypted tunnel so the data could be secure on the transfer.

Every body recommends to back up your important files and systems, but almost nobody does it :), here are some good tools to back up your full or partial linux systems, it can also back up windows partitions, but that is not going to be touch in this article.

Running a script to backup your VMWare machine. If you are running a server as a Virtual Machine and you are using VMWare to do this, you can
have this VMware Virtual Machine completely backed up in a periodic basis, and here is how