Taking backups of MySQL data programatically with PHP

Solutions for our customers give them the possibility to administrate their website completely on their own without any help (except for rare special cases of course). One thing I have been missing here is a backup capability.

If the MySQL data for some reason gets hacked or is lost for some other reason we can only rely on the web hotel's backup routines and even if they have some it might not be that easy or fast to get the backup data.

So the thing that I want to do here is to allow the customers themselves to backup their data, either manually by clicking a button or by scheduling the backup.

I found the perfect class for this purpose - MySQL Backup written by Vagharshak Tozalakyan. It allows you to easily create and instantiate the object and then set a couple of parameters dependent on what you want to do.

- You can take a full backup or define specific tables.
- You can backup just the structure or the data.
- Define during backup if the file should be save to the server or downloaded to the client.
- Choose to zip the backup files (good when storing them on the server)
- Specifying the name
- And more...

I will myself add a log functionality så that a row is created in a logging table when a backup has been made. In the administration interface the user can then create a new backup or see previous backups and choose to download previous backups taken.

I will also list tables from the MySQL database so that a user can choose which ones to backup by clicking a couple of check boxes.