Fannie includes a default task for creating MySQL database backups. For other database systems, you're on your own. This document is tailored towards MySQL in a Linux/UNIX environment. Making it work in Windows should be possible though.

Backup Basics

Nothing overly fancy is going on here. Backups are performed using mysqldump. The main advantage is utilizing fannie's configuration so there's one master file with database connection info that all tools and scripts rely on. If you rotate database passwords periodically, that means just one file to update.

Configuration

Fannie's main install/config page exposes a few configuration options for database backups:

Path to backups is where to store the backups. Each database (default is4c_op, is4c_trans, & trans_archve) is given its own subdirectory here. This path should be writeable and of course have adequate free space
Path to mysqldump is your system directory for mysql-related programs. The default, /usr/bin/, should be fine on most systems. Some systems given cron a very limited shell, so full paths with binaries provide some error-proofing.
Number of backups is how many backups, per database, to store. Backups are named with a date stamp (e.g., is4c_opYYYYMMDD.sql). When the number of existing backups exceeds this setting, the oldest one(s) are deleted.
Compress backups is optional. Turning this one just passes the backup through gzip. The normal mysql dumps are plain text, so space savings from compression are pretty significant. For very large databases, the CPU overhead of compression is also significant though. For multi-GB databses, a bigger disk may be a better solution.

Once the configuration is set, just enable and schedule the job nightly.db.backup.php via Fannie Dayend Polling => Scheduled Tasks.

Restoring a Backup

First, if you used compression, decompress the desired backup file. In most graphical environments, that's just double-clicking it. On the command line, try gzip -d <backup file>.

Next, load the backup file. If you're using any sort of GUI tool to manage your MySQL server, just find it's backup/restore option and restore from your backup file. The format's pretty universal, so any tool should handle it. Working on the command line, try mysql -u <mysql username> -p <mysql password> -h <mysql host IP> < <backup file>. Example for clarity: mysql -u root -p secret_passcode -h localhost < is4c_op20120101.sql.