Yesterday, I made a huge mistake while testing a new version of my RSS syndication application: I ran the installation script, which has the effect of (re)creating all the tables used by the application.
This has reminded me of 2 things:
- an installation script should not wipe existing tables, at least not without warning the user
- a backup strategy would not be the worse idea
But knowing that and having a solution to my current problem are two completely different things.
Fortunately, OVH (the hosting service I’m using) are awesome, and allow you to retrieve a backup of your database, either from yesterday or from last week.
To create a dump of your database, connect to your hosting with SSH, then enter the following command:
mysqldump --host=your_host --user=your_user --password=your_password --port=3307 your_bdd > mybackup.sql
Port 3307 is used for yesterday’s backup, port 3317 is for last week’s.
This will create a dump of your database in the file mybackup.sql. To import it back, enter:
cat mybackup.sql | mysql --host=your_host --user=your_user --password=your_password your_bdd
And voilà, your database is back to the state it was in yesterday.