Joost Waversveld wrote:
=== RAID IS NO BACKUP! RAID is only to survive hardware failure of the hard disk(s) (and only if you don't use RAID0!).
Other people are mentioning the Master/Slave setup. This will do if you just need one up to date backup for the coincidence the complete master server fails but not for the occasion someone / something enters the wrong SQL query and deletes the wrong data! Then the slave server will also execute this SQL query and deletes the data also!
If you want to have the opportunity to go back in time, then you have to make dumps through mysqldump.
=== The bigger the data, the slower the backup will be, the longer the tables will be locked, the greater is the change your users will notice it with using the application.
For a speedy backup, could put the db on LVM. Then your procedure would be shutdown/freeze db, make lv snapshot, startup/unfreeze db, rsync/backup data, remove snapshot.