Amazon S3 is a cost-effective, redundant, and straight-forward solution for off-site data backups. Using the highly recommended aws command line tool by Tim Kay and a simple shell script running nightly, creating an automatic remote database backup is easy.
After installing aws, I created a shell script as shown below.
#!/bin/bash
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID= # your aws access key id
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= # your secret access key
DBUSER= # the database username
DBPASS= # the database password
DBNAME= # the name of the database
BUCKET= # the root bucket to store the backup
FILE=$DBNAME.bkp.$(date +_%b_%d_%y.%s).sql.gz
mysqldump -u $DBUSER -p$DBPASS $DBNAME | gzip -9 > /tmp/$FILE
aws put $BUCKET/bkp/sql/$FILE /tmp/$FILE --private
rm -f /tmp/$FILE # cleanup
A nightly (at 1AM) cron is then setup for the user running the above script
0 1 * * * /home/app/s3dbbkp 2>&1
This is clearly a very simple implementation, but for my current needs (and likely others) it is perfect.
