Utilizing Gizmo's Backup Process is there a way to script the closing of the forums while this backup is taking place?

Is it necessary to close the board or does the mysqldump process close the tables being backed up automatically?

How do others perform this task? Our board is active 24x7 since we have a worldwide membership, though it is a tad light at the wee hours of the morning USA time.

My host makes daily backups automatically, but I don't think (know if) they lock the tables as I've never noticed it...

I looked at the dotoggleopen.php file and decided that if I were to close the board during the backup I will just swap in a config.inc.php file that has the BOARD_IS_CLOSED => '1' setting, run my sql dump and then swap back a config.inc.php file that has that set to '0'

I don't bother with the board close. The backup is done so quick, in the middle of the night, that anything lost would be close to nothing.

Good to know that, I'll just cron the backup job and see how it goes tonight.

You should close your board before backing up.
The mysqldump will create the file as you select it; it will do it immediately.
Automating the process would be possible, but I'd recommend doing it manually, then you know when to re open when the backup is done.

the backup should just take a couple of seconds/minutes.

Actually I just stumbled across a nice little utility script for monitoring mysqldump. Well actually it does a lot more than that, it will:

- set daily, weekly monthly backups
- rotate backups
- backup single, multiple, all or exclude databases
- compress backups in addition to compressing the backup stream
- email the results, backup file, both, or only on error
- create time/date stamped backups, and separate directories
- run pre and post backup commands

It is all in a shell script so it's easy to adjust to your needs.

I generally will run backups a few times manually to be sure nothing blows up, but once I know all is well things become automated from there on out.

how bout a Linky Poo™ to it .. i'd like to tinker with it too

tia

Ah yes of course, linky poo...

Thats been around for a while and well used,
probably because it does everything on the tin