Losing production data is not some rite of passage
Almost everybody has these stories
Running development tasks against a production database
Deleting the wrong data
Dropping tables
I've been there. It sucks.
The crazy part are that these are seen as eventualities. And maybe they are!
But they don't have to be catastrophic. What if we could ensure they were just minor annoyances?
Your CRON isn't enough.
It's a great start, but it's not enough to prevent future headaches.
Periodic backups are just that - periodic. You'll lose any new data after that backup.
The binary log, disabled by default, enables the most powerful recovery tooling.
Popular utilities don't backup binary logs, and don't stream backups directly off-site.
Tracking & alerting of backup failures & metrics are an afterthought at best.
The Concepts
There's just a few concepts you need to know to really understand how to make effective backups.
Transactions & Isolation Levels - We'll cover transactions and MySQL's isolation levels, which will teach us how to correctly make use of mysqldump
Binary Logs & Log Format - We'll cover why you always want binary logs enabled, and the pros/cons of the 3 formats they can be saved as
Two styles of backups
Even done properly, periodic backups on a busy database are out of date before they're even finished. On the flip side, recovering from continuous backups can take hours to rebuild from query history.

We need both styles of backups to be truly effective. This course will cover
Periodic Backups - In-depth mysqldump, and what you need to know about data consistency
Continuous Backups - Prevent data loss by keeping a continuous backup of binary log files
No, I'm not setting you up to for database replication (although that's good too)!
We'll cover ways to keep your database backups as up to date as possible without forcing you to manage another database.

Manage your backups
Untested backups are a gamble. We'll power-up our backup strategy by covering
Automated Backups - Automating your backups beyond a periodic CRON task.
Tested Backups - Strategies for testing your backups so you don't end up like Gitlab.

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