MySQL Automate backups

Question

I am trying to automate the backups of our MySQL databases. The databases are hosted on shared servers, and can be restarted at anytime, which mean CRON jobs won't be persistent (according to support at my web hosts).

I am currently running the jobs manually via MySQL Workbench at given intervals.

I am trying to automate this process, but I cannot fathom how to do it. There seems to be no options in MySQL Workbench, and Google seems to yield nothing.

I have attempted to run mysqldump on my local machine, with the view to creating some kind of script to do this from my machine. But I get an error - mysqldump: Got error: 2049: Connection using old (pre-4.1.1) authentication protocol refused (client option 'secure_auth' enabled) when trying to connect - which I can't seem to disable at the server end or override at my end.

Any advice?

Answer 1

The standard automatic backup for MySQL is the socalled "MySQL Enterprise Backup" (MEB). MySQL Workbench works with MEB, but as the name indicates this solution is only available for MySQL enterprise servers.

Another solution would be to run a cron job on the target server (using mysqldump). Missed jobs will be executed after the system is up again, so this is a reliable solution too.

If you cannot install a cron job on the target machine then you will have no choice but to manually trigger the backup either with MySQL Workbench or on the commandline.