MySQL Backup And Recovery With mysql-zrm On Debian Sarge

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 09/27/2006

This guide describes how to back up and recover your MySQL databases with mysql-zrm on a Debian Sarge system. mysql-zrm is short for Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, it is a new tool that lets you create full logical or raw backups of your databases (regardless of your storage engine and MySQL configuration), generate reports about the backups, verify the integrity of the backups, and recover your databases. It can also send email notifcations about the backup status, and you can implement multiple backup policies (based on your applications and based on time (e.g. daily, weekly, etc.)).

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

mysql-zrm works on MySQL 4.1 and above, so I assume you already have a MySQL server installed on your Debian Sarge system, e.g. like this:

apt-get install mysql-client-4.1 mysql-common-4.1 mysql-server-4.1

This also installs the package libdbd-mysql-perl which is needed by mysql-zrm as mysql-zrm is written in Perl.

2 Installation

Zmanda has released an rpm package of mysql-zrm for rpm-based distributions like Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, CentOS, etc., but no package for Debian Sarge. So we must download the mysql-zrm source package from http://www.zmanda.com/downloads.html. Select the stable release (at the time of this writing it was 1.0.3) and download it to your /tmp directory:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.zmanda.com/downloads/community/ZRM-MySQL/1.0.3/Source/MySQL-zrm-1.0.3.tar.gz

Next we unpack the sources and go to the source directory:

tar xvfz MySQL-zrm-1.0.3.tar.gz
cd MySQL-zrm-1.0.3

Unfortunately the installation instructions in the INSTALL file only say that you can install the mysql-zrm rpm package if you are on an rpm-based distribution, but nothing more. Also, there's no installation script and no installation instructions for the source package on the Zmanda web site, so I had to find out myself how to get mysql-zrm installed on my Debian Sarge system. This is how I did it:

chown root:root *
mv mysql-zrm /usr/bin
mv mysql-zrm-reporter /usr/bin
mv mysql-zrm-scheduler /usr/bin
gzip mysql-zrm.1
mv mysql-zrm.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1
gzip mysql-zrm.conf.5
mv mysql-zrm.conf.5.gz /usr/share/man/man5
gzip mysql-zrm-reporter.1
mv mysql-zrm-reporter.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1
gzip mysql-zrm-reporter.conf.5
mv mysql-zrm-reporter.conf.5.gz /usr/share/man/man5
gzip mysql-zrm-scheduler.1
mv mysql-zrm-scheduler.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1
mkdir /etc/mysql-zrm
mv *.conf /etc/mysql-zrm
mkdir -p /usr/lib/mysql-zrm/Data/Report/Plugin
mv Report.pm /usr/lib/mysql-zrm/Data
mv Base.pm /usr/lib/mysql-zrm/Data/Report
mv *.pm /usr/lib/mysql-zrm/Data/Report/Plugin
mkdir /var/log/mysql-zrm
gzip AUTHORS
gzip COPYING
gzip INSTALL
gzip README
mkdir /usr/share/doc/MySQL-zrm
mv * /usr/share/doc/MySQL-zrm
mkdir /var/lib/mysql-zrm
touch /etc/mysql-zrm/mysql-zrm-release

That's it. The executable files have been moved to /usr/bin, the configuration files are in /etc/mysql-zrm, and we even have man pages for our executables (mysql-zrm, mysql-zrm-reporter, and mysql-zrm-scheduler), so if you are not sure about the usage of the executables, you can run

man mysql-zrm

man mysql-zrm-reporter

man mysql-zrm-scheduler