Backup / Restore Options

[rimshot]

From my understanding Siteground only provides weekly backups of data. I need to have nighly automated backups for Drupal and Mediawiki sites I have hosted at Siteground. I'm a little unsure as to the best approach to do this since we do not have command line access on our shared servers. How have others solved this problem? One method I have used when I have had command line access was to :
1. run a mysqldump of all my databases on the server.
2. use rsync to copy the files that have changed form the server to my local computer.

since we don't have rsync I'm guessing I can write a simple bash script to FTP all my files off the server, but somehow I need to dump the database from my script. Can I use mysqldump remotely? Is it possible to do an automated mysqldump on my shared server at siteground?
Any thoughts or solutions to how people have solved the problem of not having nightly automated backups much appreciated. thanks!

[RedKarl]

Hi Rimshot.
I am using a php script from here http://restkultur.ch/personal/wolf/scripts/db_backup/index.html to do the database dumps. I works brilliantly BUT. I read on a thread somewhere that using the compress option corrupts the backup files after a few days. An email conversation with the author confirmed this, he said that there is an update to a pear class but I couldn't see how to implement it. What all that means is that the option to attach your DB backups to an email and have it sent to you automatically is out.

I am using the script to create the backups daily via cron but I have to remember to daily copy them to my local computer. If you could do a script to handle that part it would be brilliant! Could you do that?

-Karl-

[Bill]

Another option is to request in a ticket that a backup creation script is written for you.

We do have this service, though it is a paid one.

As for downloading the backups - you can write a script to your machine to download them daily.

[RedKarl]

Thanks for your response here Bill,
Actually I already have the backup part of the script working brilliantly. And I agree, a script to download them to my computer was exactly what I was asking rimshot for.