For data backing up, its recommended that a crontab job which runs mysqldump is used. Example
$ mkdir ~/backups/
$ crontab -e
then add :
0 6 * * * mysqldump -h $HOST -u $MYSQLUSER -p $MYSQLPASSWORD project_assignment_db | gzip > ~/backups/pa_backup_`date +\%F-\%Hh\%M`.gz
# end crontab edit
where the values for HOST, MYSQLUSER and MYSQLPASSWORD should be subsituted according to values in the settings.py file in website_ProjectAssignment directory.
To provide backup should the server be lost, setup a scheduled rsync job on a remote machine as to backup to data on an externally.
To recover data copy the chosen back up file and run load_django_data_dump.sh. Example
$ cd website_ProjectAssignment/data
$ scp adymond@mecheng.up.ac.za:~/backups/pa_backup_2012-12-06-06h00.gz ./
$ bash load_mysql_data_dump.sh pa_backup_2012-12-06-06h00.gz