Automatically backing up files before making changes

dave — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:40:01 +0000

It’s best practice (and common sense) to make a backup of a file before you edit it. Unfortunately it’s easy to forget to do this. We use this simple script below to make a time/date stamped copy of a file before launching the editor (in this case vim). We create it as /usr/local/bin/bvi.

#!/bin/bash [[ -r $1 ]] && cp $1{,.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M`} || echo "$1 is a new file"
vim $1

We then add the following two aliases to our ~/.bashrc file to make sure it’s run automatically when we call vim.

alias vi=/usr/local/bin/bvi alias vim=/usr/local/bin/bvi

This isn’t a replacement for good version control of important files, but it’s a good safety net. It’s also worth noting that this can leave a lot of old copies of files laying about, so it’s work cleaning out old copies every now and again.

Check, repair and optimize all MySQL databases

dave — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:49:14 +0000

The following command will check, repair and optimize all databases on your MySQL server.

mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair --check --optimize --all-databases

It is the equivalent of calling CHECK TABLE, REPAIR TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE and OPTIMZE TABLE for each table in each database on your server.

We tend to run this command directly after our scheduled backups.

Open Sourcery » backups

Automatically backing up files before making changes

Check, repair and optimize all MySQL databases