Re: tarsnap and mysql best practice

[Emre Hasegeli <hasegeli@startup.kitchen>]

Willem de Groot <willem@byte.nl>:

> Hi & thanks to Colin for making tarsnap!
> 
> Perhaps this mail belongs on a MySQL list, but as this should be a fairly common use case for tarsnap users, I hope a tarsnap+mysql best practice has evolved that I could not find ;)

As it is not a MySQL list, I can safely suggest to use PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL has on-line backup and point-in-time recovery [1] since
2005.

The best solution I could find of then I was administrating a MySQL
database was to maintain a replicated slave to backup. That way
you can shutdown the MySQL server and copy the files. I know there
are more efficient solutions but it was a simple and safe one.

> I haven't tested it, and there are still some loose ends. Would this approach require a backup of the ib_logfile* files? Binary logs? What are the chances of data corruption? 

You would need the binary logs for point-in-time recovery. You shoud
store them as long as the file system level backups.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/backup-online.html