Automate MySQL Database Backup via Cronjob

Automating a MySQL Database backup in cPanel is a two step process.

The backup cron will continue to create backup files until your disk space is completely filled up. In order to prevent this, you will want to create a logrotate file and create a cronjob to automatically rotate out the older backups, to keep disk space down.

Create the Backup cron in cPanel

You will need to know your Database username and database password in order to configure the backup.

1) Log into your cPanel
2) Go to Advanced -> Cron Jobs
3) Enter the email you wish to email the results of the cron job to.
4) Scroll down a bit, and either select a common setting (Once a day, once a week, etc) from the drop down. or enter a custom entry for days, weeks, months, etc.
5) For the command to run, enter the following command. Replace CPANELUSERNAME with your cpanel username. Replace DBUSERNAME with your database username. Replace PASSWORD with the database password, and CPANELUSERNAME with your cPanel username.

date=`date -I`; /usr/bin/mysqldump -uDBUSERNAME -pPASSWORD dbname > /home/CPANELUSERNAME/dbname$date.sql

As an example, the cPanel user is example, Database username is myusername, database name is mydatabase, password is mypassword. The command to enter into the cron entry is

date=`date -I`; /usr/bin/mysqldump -umyusername -pmypassword mydatabase > /home/example/mydatabase_$date.sql

This will create a sql file in your /home/cpanelusername directory with a name similar to mydatabase_20180101.sql.