[CentOS] your advice on backup procedure

For MySQL backups, I think nobody mentioned doing nightly backups with 
mysqldump and then backing them up with rsync or other tools. That is 
what I do. No need to stop any services even for a second.

I have a two-tier backup solution, where I first backup things with 
rsync to "backup 1" and then use rdiff-backup to construe an incremental 
archive on "backup 2" (in other location).

- Jussi