Sql Backup Question

[Alec]

One of my websites is currently running a Wiki script. The script uses a MySQL database, as the Wiki is starting to grow in size pretty rapidly I wanted to make a backup just incase anything should go wrong (as well as regular backups in the future every few weeks).

 

When I looked on the mediawiki website (the software I am using), it gives the following warning:

 

Warning for MySQL 4.1 and later: In some common configurations, mysqldump can corrupt MediaWiki's stored text. If your database's character set is set to "latin1" rather than "UTF-8", mysqldump in 4.1+ will apply a character set conversion step which can corrupt text containing non-English characters as well as punctuation like "smart quotes" and long dashes used in English text.

 

You can see which charset your tables are set to with a command like SHOW CREATE TABLE text. The last line will include a 'DEFAULT CHARSET' bit.

 

Use the option --default-character-set=latin1 on the mysqldump command line to avoid the conversion if you find it set to "latin1".

 

I don't have the first idea what it means or how to check what the default character set is. I poked about a little in phpMyAdmin, but in all honesty I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Can somebody please advise me on how to go about performing the check described above, or even just tell me if the database is likely to be set to latin1 or UTF-8?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Alec

[TCH-Bruce]

The charset is usually set to MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8). Yet my databases both are set to latin1_swedish

 

Check out dbsender to backup your databases through a cron job.

 

You can find more information in the backup topic pinned in this forum.