Pull in Viget posts

content/elsewhere/backup-your-database-in-git/index.md

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+---
+title: "Backup your Database in Git"
+date: 2009-05-08T00:00:00+00:00
+draft: false
+needs_review: true
+canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/backup-your-database-in-git/
+---
+
+**Short version**: dump your production database into a git repository
+for an instant backup solution.
+
+**Long version**: keeping backups of production data is fundamental for
+a well-run web application, but it's tricky to maintain history while
+keeping disk usage at a reasonable level. You could continually
+overwrite the backup with the latest data, but you risk automatically
+replacing good data with bad. You could save each version in a separate,
+timestamped file, but since most of the data is static, you would end up
+wasting a lot of disk space.
+
+When you think about it, a database dump is just SQL code, so why not
+manage it the same way you manage the rest of your code --- in a source
+code manager? Setting such a scheme up is dead simple. On your
+production server, with git installed:
+
+    mkdir -p /path/to/backup cd /path/to/backup mysqldump -u [user] -p[pass] --skip-extended-insert [database] > [database].sql git init git add [database].sql git commit -m "Initial commit" 
+
+The `--skip-extended-insert` option tells mysqldump to give each table
+row its own `insert` statement. This creates a larger initial commit
+than the default bulk insert, but makes future commits much easier to
+read and (I suspect) keeps the overall repository size smaller, since
+each patch only includes the individual records added/updated/deleted.
+
+From here, all we have to do is set up a cronjob to update the backup:
+
+    0 * * * * cd /path/to/backup && \ mysqldump -u [user] -p[pass] --skip-extended-insert [database] > [database].sql && \ git commit -am "Updating DB backup" 
+
+You may want to add another entry to run
+[`git gc`](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-gc.html)
+every day or so in order to keep disk space down and performance up.
+
+Now that you have all of your data in a git repo, you've got a lot of
+options. Easily view activity on your site with `git whatchanged -p`.
+Update your staging server to the latest data with
+`git clone ssh://[hostname]/path/to/backup`. Add a remote on
+[Github](https://github.com/) and get offsite backups with a simple
+`git push`.
+
+This technique might fall down if your app approaches
+[Craigslist](http://craigslist.org/)-level traffic, but it's working
+flawlessly for us on [SpeakerRate](http://speakerrate.com), and should
+work well for your small- to medium-sized web application.