[CentOS] What to backup?

[Benjamin Franz]

Robert Heller wrote:
> What *I'd* do, is have separate partitions for /, /var /opt and /home. 
> And do a monthy full dump of each file system, weekly incremental dumps
> of /var and /opt, and daily or every other day incremental dumps of
> /home.  It is probably iffy to get a meaningful dump of mysql's running
> database.  It probably makes better sense to do a SQL dump -- 'man
> mysqldump'
If you can tolerate a few seconds of having your database offline, the 
fastest and easiest way to get a coherent snapshot is to keep 
/var/lib/mysql on its own LVM partition with extra unallocated extents 
and take an LVM snapshot with the database shutdown for just a few 
seconds. Something like the following:

/bin/mkdir /mnt/mysql-snapshot
/sbin/service mysql stop
/usr/sbin/lvcreate --permission r -L16G -s -n dbbackup /dev/mysql/data
/sbin/service mysql start
/bin/mount -r /dev/mysql/data /mnt/mysql-snapshot
/usr/bin/rsync -Saq --delete /mnt/mysql-snapshot /var/lib/mysql-backup/
/bin/umount /mnt/mysql-snapshot
/usr/sbin/lvremove -f /dev/mysql/data

Now you have a static and coherent snapshot of the database that can be 
used for restoration just by copying it into /var/lib/mysql and that is 
safe to be backed up by ordinary backup software. And the total time 
offline for the backup is typically on the order ~10 seconds. If you do 
it at 2AM no one is likely to even notice that you that you went offline 
for 10 seconds or so.

-- 
Benjamin Franz