On PHPBuilder.com today they have a new article posted sharing a few different methods you can use to do backups of your (MySQL) database and a few handy tricks/tools you can use to optimize it as well.

Every computer system has a backup. Nevertheless, the number of problems caused by a lack of a recent backup is huge. One of the reasons for that may be the fact that the backup process is not entirely automated. So, let's see how to automate the database backup process in PHP.

There's three recommendations for the (simple) database backup that can produce a file of the current database contents - mysqldump, mysqlhostcopy and a "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" statement. On the optimization size they suggest mysqlcheck, an OPTIMIZE query to help find trouble spots. There's a script included at the end showing how these methods can be combined into a simple PHP script, something that can easily be dropped into a cron job to perform every so often.