mylvmbackup

mylvmbackup is a completely free and open source script implemented in Perl and designed from the offset to be used by database administrators who want to quickly create backups of the data found on their MySQL servers.

How mylvmbackup works?

It automatically gets a read lock on all database tables, flushes all server caches to a disk drive, creates a LVM (Logical Volume Manager) snapshot of the volume that contains the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the database tables.

Besides Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language), users will also need to install the DBD::mysql and DBI modules in order to properly use the mylvmbackup script. Additionally, the script also uses the /bin/date, tar, LVM utilities, and the mount and umount system utilities.

Command-line options

The script comes with more command-line options than expected. These can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘mylvmbackup --help’ command in a terminal emulator app. Among the most important ones, we can mention the ability to specify the TCP port, UNIX socket, hostname, username and password for the MySQL server, the action to run (backup or purge), the size of the snapshot volume, as well as the prefix and suffix for naming the backup.

Getting started with mylvmbackup

The good news is that mylvmbackup doesn’t need to be installed in order to use it. Therefore, simply download the source package from Softoware using the dedicated download button above, save the archive somewhere on your PC, unpack it and run the ‘mylvmbackup’ command.

Add the ‘--help’ argument to the command (e.g. mylvmbackup --help) to view its command-line options (see the section above for details). The bad news is that you will need to install several Perl modules from CPAN to use the script, such as Config::IniFiles, Date::Format, DBD::mysql, File::Copy, and File::Copy::Recursive.

If you want to install the mylvmbackup script system wide and make it available to all users on your system, just run the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user.

What is new in this release:

• Improved error handling: send out an email if mail_report_on has been set to "errors" and a log message with log level LOG_ERR was logged.
• Abort and clean up if the snapshot volume could not be mounted
• Abort and clean up if the backup creation failed
• Exit with a non-zero return code if errorstate was set

What is new in version 0.13:

• The precleanup.pm hook sample was deleted as it has potential to cause harm and is too specialized on a particular use case.
• Support was added for rsync via SSH.
• InnoDB recovery was fixed in case a relative path to the MySQL data directory is defined.
• The documentation of relpath in the man page was improved.

What is new in version 0.12:

• Removed the absolute path names to external tools (make sure $PATH is correct)
• Added --log-err to the startup options of the recovery instance to avoid cluttering the server's error log
• Added support for hooks written as Perl Modules. (Matthew Boehm)
• Added support for date/time-formatted path names for backupdir and mountdir (Matthew Boehm)
• Backupdir and mountdir are now created automatically (Matthew Boehm)
• Added new hook "logerr" when an error is logged. (Matthew Boehm)
• Added Option --keep-mount... (Tim Stoop)
• Removed the bind mount, now requires LVMv2
• Support reading login/password from ~/.my.cnf (Baron Schwartz)
• Documentation fixes and improvements (Ville Skytta) (Bug #302144)

What is new in version 0.11:

• The --quiet option was added.
• Error handling was made more robust and consistent.
• Support was added for non-GNU tar implementations.
• Support for rsnap backups was added.
• Code cleanups were done.
• The backup file name suffix is now configurable.

What is new in version 0.10:

• Applied patch from Marc Haber: added option "--keep_snapshot" that will skip the removal of the backup snapshot before terminating the script. Providing the option "--backuptype=none" will now skip creating a backup using the builtin backup modules. Both options provide more flexibility when using hooks for performing the actual backup tasks.
• Added two new hooks: "backupsuccess" and "backupfailure" which are called respectively upon success of failure of the backup operation (Bug #264089)
• Make sure that binaries are being found ($PATH may not include /sbin when called from cron), added missing entry for "lvs" to mylvmbackup.conf (Bug #255703)
• Updated documentation

Requirements:

• Perl