Alfredo Pérez's Blog

Let’s see how long is going to take this time.

Ok, everything is right, you have finished your application (with a huge effort) and is running ok in your local server. Now you try to deploy to the server and… “java.lang.NoSuchMethod exception”… “error 500″… Is it possible to know what kind of information is that in order to debug a failure? What is supposed to be done now?

Since this days the server has been out for holidays I have been tempted of moving everything to another server, just until the service is back. However I have faced the problem that I didn’t have access to an updated database, so I couldn’t do anything. I wished to have at least a version of the database from the same day or the day before of the server crash.

The question is that I have founded a quite easy solution: to send myself a mail with a copy of the database dump once or twice a day (this is not possible on every server)

In order to do that you only have to create a script like this.

#!/bin/sh

mysqldump -u user -ppassword -h host.domain database | gzip > ~/database.sql.gz

echo “This is an autogenerated mail with the backup” | mutt -s “[databasebak]” -a ~/database.sql.gz miemailparabackup@servidor.com

It’s necessary to have mutt installed because this command sends an email in MIME format so we can send a binary file attached

We can call this script “~/scripts/dbbak.sh” so now we only need a “crontab.txt” looking like:

SHELL=/bin/bash

#h m dom mon dow command

35 0,12 * * * ~/scripts/dbback.sh

And then we install the crontab file with

crontab crontab.txt

I hope it will be helpful for you.