Keep vagrant database data after vagrant destroy

Question

What is the best/acceptable practice for keeping database data after a Vagrant destroy?

Should I create a shared folder for my database data? If so where (by default) does ubuntu store such data?

I forgot to mention my host and guest OS' are Ubuntu and am referring to MySql

Answer 1

I needed a way to backup my database whenever I vagrant destroy the instance or if something happened with the box and I needed to kill the process thus loosing data. I primarily work with CMS systems and having the backend database persisted is very important.

I'm already sharing a db folder that contains a sql file that is used when provisioning. I installed the vagrant-triggers plugin and have it running a mysqldump.sh script file whenever I run the vagrant destroy command.

config.trigger.before :destroy do info "Dumping the database before destroying the VM..." run_remote "bash /home/vagrant/db/mysqldump.sh" end

The mysqldump.sh file runs a mysqldump command to a separate backup.sql file.

mysqldump -u root database > /home/vagrant/db/backup.sql

Answer 2

It depends on the RDBMS you use.

For MySQL on Ubuntu, you can simply backup (tar or rsync to a remote host) the /var/lib/mysql folder (when mysql is NOT running) and its configuration files /etc/mysql.

For PostgreSQL it is similar, the database files are normally under cd /usr/local/pgsql/data. Refer to File System level backup

NOTE: avoid using the default vboxsf to share large number of files between guest and host because it has known performance issues.