Under Upgrades is "Backup. While this link is helpful, you really do need to do more. Protect your data by backing up at least once each day. How often depends on how much data you are willing to lose. Busy sites with lots of searches and clicks and a good amount of revenue flow may want to run this once an hour.
Create a directory below your html directory (below where your users can gain access). This will be your backup folder, where all of your backups will be placed.
Create a simple text file using notepad or some other text editor and place this code in it. replace PATH/TO/BACKUP FOLDER with the correct path to the folder you created Usually /home/something/something/your_directory. Save it with a name like backup_bash.txt. It can be anything you want but make it something that you know what it is. Place this file in your backup directory you just created.
Set up a cron to run using the path to backup_bash.txt. Now every time your cron runs you will have a backup called backup2005-28-04.sql.gz. The date will vary depending on the day it was created. If you run it more than once a day the file will be rewritten till the next day so you may want to adjust it if you want to run this more often than once a day.
This is a basic set up. You can set this up to be emailed if you wish or set it up to be placed in another directory. Set your permissions so that your server can read and right to this folder.
For more advanced configurations do a search on Google or your very own favorite search engine for bash files. You should get enough resources to be able to do anything you want.
Use the code below and set it up for your configuration
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#!/bin/bash
# This file is used to back up my mysql database.
# This is run via cron on the server
# I don't want to delete this file
mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD --opt DATABASE > /PATH/TO/BACKUP FOLDER/backup.sql
gzip /PATH/TO/BACKUP FOLDER/backup.sql
set `date "+%m %d %Y"`;
fname=$3"-"$2"-"$1;
fname1="backup"$fname".sql";
mv /PATH/TO/BACKUP FOLDER/backup.sql.gz /PATH/TO/BACKUP FOLDER/$fname1.gz