I have a fairly small MySQL database (a Textpattern install) on a server that I do not have SSH access to (I have FTP access only). I need to regularly download the live database to my local dev server on demand; i.e., I would like to either run a script and/or have a cron job running. What are some good ways of doing this?
Some points to note:
- Live server is running Linux, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1
- Local server is running the same (so using PHP is an option), but the OS is Windows
- Local server has Ruby on it (so using Ruby is a valid option)
- The live MySQL db can accept remote connections from different IPs
- I cannot enable replication on the remote server
Update: I’ve accepted BlaM’s answer; it is beautifully simple. Can’t believe I didn’t think of that. There was one problem, though: I wanted to automate the process, but the proposed solution prompts the user for a password. Here is a slightly modified version of the mysqldump command that passes in the password:
mysqldump -u USER --password=MYPASSWORD DATABASE_TO_DUMP -h HOST > backup.sql
Since you can access your database remotely, you can use mysqldump from your windows machine to fetch the remote database. From commandline:
The program will ask you for the database password and then generate a file c:\backup\database.sql that you can run on your windows machine to insert the data.
With a small database that should be fairly fast.