[Mediawiki-l] problems with recovery (Debian)

[Platonides]

Dan Saperstein wrote:
> Basically, here is my story - was running a remotely-hosted Debian  
> (Etch) dedicated server with latest PHP5/Apache2/MySQL5 installation,  
> as well as MediaWiki 1.11.0 (i'm 99% sure this was the on the server,  
> but it could have been 1.10.x).  The wiki page uses the SQL database  
> named "wikidb".  Daily, at 4am, we've had a cron job that took all the  
> files in an SQL folder (for example, /var/lib/mysql/wikidb ), which  

So the data you were copying wasn't guaranteed to be consistent...

> were .MYI, .MYD, and .frm files of the various tables and bzipped  
> them, and my computer at home connected every morning at 5am via FTP  
> to download them.  I've kept a week's worth in constant rotation for  
> over a year.  So, I figured if we ever had a bad crash, we'd be  
> covered.  Not the .SQL files that would have been nicer to have, but  
> at least something.
> 
> Having not really paid much attention to this daily archive, I didn't  
> notice that it was only about 600 KB in size, despite several hundred  
> pages.  I figured it compressed well.  Maybe not...

Did you transfer the data in binary form?
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Loony-BIN.aspx