Testing Your Backup

Whichever backup method you choose, it is very important to test your backup or, more precisely, your recovery. It is not unusual to find administrators who dutifully create a backup on a regular basis but have never checked whether they can recover from a backup if needed.

A backup procedure should be something you give serious consideration when analyzing your risks and deciding how to do it. Where can you put the backup so that it is on a different physical disk? How can you ensure that a copy of the backup is stored securely offsite? Having made these decisions and scheduled the backup for regular processing, you should not be worrying about whether it works. If you have tried to recover as a test, you can find any problems before they are crucial.

One important part of your MySQL installation and recovery process to check is the binary log. It is not enabled by default, but it is needed to bring a restored database back up to date.