Database backups

info

Users, folders and filenames have been renamed from "dashboard" ⇒ "controlpanel". Be aware that the provided commands may not fit your installation. Please change the users, folder and filenames for the commands corresponding to your installation.

All important data is stored in the database. This includes all servers, users, and other information.
It's important to keep backups of your database to ensure that you can restore your panel if something goes wrong.

How to back up

You can use MySQL dump to back up your database.
This command will create a backup file in the /var/www/controlpanel/ folder.

mysqldump -u root -p controlpanel > /var/www/controlpanel/backup.sql

How to restore

To restore a backup, you need a fresh database. If you already have a database, you can use the following command to drop it.

danger

Warning, this will delete all Controlpanel related data! Make sure your database is backed up before continuing.

mysql -u root -p controlpanel -e "DROP DATABASE controlpanel"

Then you can restore the backup. You can also restore the backup on any other new server.

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE controlpanel;
CREATE USER 'controlpaneluser'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'USE_YOUR_OWN_PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON controlpanel.* TO 'controlpaneluser'@'127.0.0.1';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit
mysql -u root -p controlpanel < /var/www/controlpanel/backup.sql

How to automatically backup

You can automatically back up your database every day at midnight, for example. First, create a read only user for the database.

mkdir -p /var/www/controlpanel/backups
mysql -u root -p
CREATE USER 'controlpanelbackupuser'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'USE_YOUR_OWN_PASSWORD';
GRANT LOCK TABLES, SELECT ON controlpanel.* TO 'controlpanelbackupuser'@'127.0.0.1';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Then create a cronjob to run the following command at midnight. Run crontab -e and add the following line:

0 0 * * * mysqldump -u controlpanelbackupuser --password=<USE_YOUR_OWN_PASSWORD> --single-transaction --quick --lock-tables=false controlpanel > /var/www/controlpanel/backups-$(date +\%F).sql

This will create a backup at /var/www/controlpanel/backups-$(date +\%F).sql every day at midnight. Every file will have the date when it was made in the filename, so you can also resolve issues that happened a few days ago.