Backup MySQL to S3 with Rails

2009-03-09T15:25:00Z

UPDATE: This code is too old. Use db2fog instead. It does the same thing but better.

Here is some code I wrote over the weekend – db2s3. It’s a rails plugin that provides rake tasks for backing up your database and storing it on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. S3 is a trivially cheap offsite backup solution – for small databases it costs about 4 cents per month, even if you’re sending full backups every hour.

There are many scripts around that do this already, but they fail to address the biggest actual problem. The aws-s3 gem provides a really nice ruby interface to S3, and dumping a backup then storing it really isn’t that hard. The real problem is that I really hate system administration. I want to spend as little time as possible and I want things to Just Work.

A script is great but there’s still too many things for me to do. Where does it go in my project? How do I set my credentials? How do I call it?

That’s why a plugin was needed. It’s as little work as possible for a rails developer to backup their database, so they can get back to making their app awesome.

db2s3. Check it out.

S3 - Xavier Shay's Blog

Backup MySQL to S3 with Rails