MySQL service example - backup?

#1

The https://example MySQL service states that:

Render Disks make it effortless to deploy production-grade MySQL on Render backed by high performing SSD disks with automatic snapshots so your data is protected against database restarts and failures.

However, surely it’s not safe to simply snapshot the render disk (and therefore /var/lib/mysql) on a running MySQL instance? This may well lead to data corruption.

The example MySQL repo example seems to hint at this as there’s a separate Dockerfile for backups which runs a mysqldump command (one of the correct ways of backing up the data). This writes to /var/lib/mysql/backups so I suppose would be snapshotted as part of the render disk. However, I don’t see how this links up to the service? Is this supposed to be set up as a cron? If so, how can it access the render disk associated with the MySQL example service?

I really feel like either I’m missing something or the docs are. Please advise!

#3

Hi @russx2, I agree that the MySQL docs should say more about backups. You can create a cron job that does mysqldump backups. Note however that we don’t currently support cron jobs with attached disks (this feature is planned, see Disks for Cron Jobs | Feature Requests | Render). As an alternative I’d recommend uploading your backups to a cloud object store like S3, GCS, or wasabi. Note that cron jobs get 2 GiB of temporary disk space. So if your backup is larger than 2 GiB you’ll want to stream the mysqldump output right into an object storage bucket.

Sorry that this requires jumping through a few hoops. We hope to improve this experience going forward. For what it’s worth, our managed postgres offering does come with daily pg_dump backups.