Re: best way to backup data

[Rick James]

When someone talks about 100% perfection, I reach for my pessimist's hat...

Well, I'm saying that nothing is 100%. Are you protected against flood, earthquake, tornado, etc?

> Why do you said to pull a dump out of evault to a different computer?

* For all you know, Evault has a fatal flaw.
* Or your machine that is flawed, and testing the backup with a different machine would discover that flaw.

How many backups do you "keep"? If you keep only one in Evault, then "Murphy's law" states that Evault will crash while you are replacing your one backup.

The exit code from mysqldump cannot say whether the data is correctly saved, it can only say that the process seemed to finish correctly.

Do you have protection from the cronjob failing to run? From it failing to start? Etc, etc.

The best test is an end-to-end test (hence, loading onto a separate machine and testing that). But even that does not cover all the things that _could_ go wrong.

You are doing a good job. Don't dwell on this too long; move on to other problems to solve.