Backup a database
It's way too difficult to restore a database using the /var/lib/mysql files. It's better to use mysqldump . Assume your database is named mydbname . mysqldump -u root -p mydbname > mydbname.sql This will dump out the SQL needed to recreate the database. Normally you want this as a cron job so it runs daily. Google how to make a cron job. Put the command into a script. You also want to gzip it because it's quite big and repetitive. The below is an example of a useful script. It saves the files with dates in the names so you can revert/restore the database from any date. Note however it embeds your password into the file, this is probably a bad idea™ but you can find a better solution yourself. One way is to create an authenticated user, let them run mysql without password ( saved password ), and set them run the script, ie use the username parameter in cron. #!/bin/sh uniquedate=`date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M%S-%s"` backuppath="/var/log/mysqldumps" [ ! -d $back