4.3.8 Making Scheduled Backups

Maintaining a regular backup schedule is an important measure for preventing data loss for you MySQL server. This section discusses some simple means for setting up a schedule for running MySQL Enterprise Backup.

For Linux and other Unix-like platforms: you can set up a cron job on your system for scheduled backups. There are two types of cron jobs. To set up a user cron job, which is owned and run by a particular user, do the following:

Log on as the user who runs MySQL Enterprise Backup and use the following command to invoke an editor for creating (or modifying) a crontab:
```
$> crontab -e
```
In the editor, add an entry similar to the following one to the crontab, and then save your changes (make sure contents in both lines below appear in a single line in the crontab):
```
@daily /path-to-mysqlbackup/mysqlbackup -uroot --backup-dir=/path-to-backup-folder/cronbackups 
  --with-timestamp --backup-image=my.mib backup-to-image  &>/dev/null
```
This crontab entry invokes mysqlbackup to create a backup under the cronbackups directory at 00:00:00 everyday. Outputs from the stderr and stdout streams are redirected to /dev/null/, so they will not invoke other actions on the part of the Cron server (for example, email notifications to the user).

To set up a system cron job, which is owned and run by root, create a file under the /etc/cron.d folder and put into it a similar crontab entry as the one above, adding the user (root in the following example) before the mysqlbackup command:

@daily root /path-to-mysqlbackup/mysqlbackup -uroot --backup-=/path-to-backup-folder/cronbackups \
  --with-timestamp --backup-image=my.mib backup-to-image  &>/dev/null

Check your platform's documentation for further details on the different ways to set up cron jobs for various types of schedules.

For Windows platforms: Use the Task Scheduler for the purpose. Check the documentation for your Windows platform for instructions.