DATA SAVER

Even if you are running a small, non-commercial website, the data you store in a MySQL database is very important to you. If that database is frequently changed on a live system, a reliable backup becomes even more important. Unfortunately, the tools that web hosters provide to backup your data are often cumbersome at best. I recently made a number of major changes to the database on my test system and became concerned about what would happen if I really hosed that database. I make regular backups myself on my local machine, by simply copying the MySQL files. This option works, but recovering from a crash has its own problems. So I started looking for other solutions. After considering several of the alternatives for backing up an SQL database (see the the box titled “MySQL Backup Alternatives”), I settled on indexsoft’s MySQL Backups Manager utility [1].