While working on a recent project, i needed to set up a cron job that would run every X amount of hours and backup a database. I’ve done this a few times before, but only this time (while Googling for a better solution) i found David Walsh‘s blog post on how to Backup Your MySQL Database Using PHP. David’s done a great job and i definitely recommend you check his blog out in its entireity for some really neat web dev articles.

I decided to go and put David’s script into class form (my case of OCD is genuine :P ) and i added one or two things to it. Basically it allows you to backup one or many tables in a database, include or exclude the data from the backup and i also included Rick Ellis’ (of CodeIgniter fame) Zip class to allow you to zip up the backup and stash it somewhere.

Thanks to David Walsh and Rick Ellis!

Here’s the class: DatabaseDump.php

…and here’s how to use it:

$dump = new DatabaseDump("host", "user", "password", "database", "destination/");
$dump->backup();

Be sure to check out the DatabaseDump.php class for the documentation!