[mythtv-users] mythconverg_backup.pl vs. mysqldump

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2017 07:27:10 -0700, you wrote:

>Something has gone seriously wrong with an older version of mythbuntu
>(12.04) on my machine, so I am planning to start over with the latest
>version.  So I tried to use mythconverg_backup.pl.  It ran, but created a
>zero-byte file.  I suspect this has something to do with the malfunction on
>the current installation.  Is there any difference between using this
>script and doing a mysqldump of mythconverg?  If so what do I need to do to
>manually back up all the DB info needed to restore on the new install?

If you read the mythconverg_backup.pl file (Perl source code), you
will find that it uses mysqldump to do its backups.  It is essentially
a big wrapper around mysqldump that also compresses the backup file
and does a few other things, but the real work of making the backup is
still done by mysqldump.  So if mythconverg_backup.pl is failing, it
is likely that it is actually mysqldump that is failing.

You need to see if you can repair your database.  Are you
automatically running optimize_mythdb daily from /etc/cron.daily?  If
not, it is likely that your database has accumulated small problems
that have lead to one or more tables being crashed, and it may well be
able to be fixed fairly easily by running optimize_mythdb, which can
be found at:

/usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/maintenance/optimize_mythdb.pl