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