There are many places on the ‘net that you can find “comparable” batteries for your APC (and other) backup units.  Knowing that my friend Jason replaces battery backups with some frequency, I asked for his opinion.  He led me to Gruber Power Services.  What a find!

The prices are extremely reasonable (e.g. $15.99 for a “RBC2″ comparable battery which is $40 through APC and other sites). You obviously have to pay for shipping these heavy lead-acid batteries, but that is the case with any site from which you order.  Shipping for the entire order ended up being about $100 bucks (ugh!).

All told, I estimate that I saved about $350 (incl. shipping) by ordering from Gruber.  Assuming the rest of my experience matches those of my friend, I highly recommend them.

UPDATE (7/23/08): Got a personal email this morning from “Dawn” thanking me for my order and providing to me the UPS tracking numbers for my shipment.  Pretty cool.

UPDATE (7/30/08): The batteries were delivered Monday, as projected.  I have installed one of them so far and it fit well, connected easily and seems to be a great product.

It does the following:

1. Creates a backup of the selected db using mysqldump
2. Generates an MD5 checksum of the backup file (written to a separate file)
3. Attempts to restore the dumped file into a dummy test database
4. If errors are encountered, it grabs the error and sends an email to the designated address
5. If no errors are encountered, wraps the .sql and .sql.md5 in a timestamped, gzipped, tarball – then deletes the originals

Download the file here

#!/bin/sh
#######################################################
# LICENSE:
# (c) 2007 Brian Bell (GNU LGPL V2.1) You may
# view the full copyright text at:
# http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.html
#
# DESCRIPTION:
# A simple BASH script to do automate MySQL database
# backup; includes testing and MD5 hash creation.
# Emails designated address on failure.
#######################################################

## CONFIGURATION VARS
MYSQL_NAME=
MYSQL_HOST=
MYSQL_USER=
MYSQL_PASS=
MYSQL_TESTDB=
BACKUP_PATH=/path/to/backup/dir # No trailing slash
MAIL_SUBJECT=”TESTING MySQL Backup Error”
MAIL_TO=”monitor@yourdomain.com”

#######################################################
## We need to create a unique timestamp for use on the filename
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y_%m_%d`

## Generate the base part of the filename to use in backing up
BACKUP_FILE_BASE=”${MYSQL_NAME}_${TIMESTAMP}”

echo “Backing up $MYSQL_NAME…”
/usr/bin/mysqldump –opt -c -e -Q -h $MYSQL_HOST -u $MYSQL_USER –password=$MYSQL_PASS \
–add-drop-table $MYSQL_NAME > $BACKUP_PATH/$BACKUP_FILE_BASE.sql

## MD5 the backup file
/usr/bin/md5sum -t $BACKUP_PATH/$BACKUP_FILE_BASE.sql > $BACKUP_PATH/$BACKUP_FILE_BASE.sql.md5

## Try to import the backup sql into a test db
MYSQL_RESULT=`/usr/bin/mysql -h ${MYSQL_HOST} -u ${MYSQL_USER} –password=${MYSQL_PASS} ${MYSQL_TESTDB} < \
${BACKUP_PATH}/${BACKUP_FILE_BASE}.sql >

${BACKUP_PATH}/mysql_test.log`

if [[ “$MYSQL_RESULT” =~ “ERROR” ]]
then
echo “The following error was encountered at `date` ” > ${BACKUP_PATH}/error_email.log
echo “” >> ${BACKUP_PATH}/error_email.log
echo “#####################################################################” >> ${BACKUP_PATH}/error_email.log
echo $MYSQL_RESULT >> ${BACKUP_PATH}/error_email.log

echo “SENDING ERROR EMAIL TO: ${MAIL_TO}”
/bin/mail -s “$MAIL_SUBJECT” “$MAIL_TO” < ${BACKUP_PATH}/error_email.log
else
tar czpf $BACKUP_PATH/$TIMESTAMP_$BACKUP_FILE_BASE.sql.tar.gz $BACKUP_PATH/$BACKUP_FILE_BASE.sql* –remove-files
fi