Hi,
The best two suggestions I can give you are LVM snapshots for binary
backups, or using replication so you can back up the slave. Since you
have InnoDB tables, my personal opinion is the safest way to get a good
LVM snapshot is to shut down the server and take the snapshot; you can
then bring it back up while the backup proceeds. However, see Peter
Zaitsev's article on LVM backups for other opinions on this
(mysqlperformanceblog.com).
Either way has downsides, it's true. The downside of using a slave is
you have to do table checksums if you really want to be sure the slave
has the same data as the master. http://mysqltoolkit.sourceforge.net/
Baron
Daevid Vincent wrote:
We've got a production system with three databases. The three databases
together represent one logical set of data. The databases contain a
mixture of MyISAM and InnoDB tables.
What is the best way to backup the entire system (i.e. all three
databases) to ensure that I get a coherent snapshot of the data? Since
this is a production system, it's not desirable to block access or
shutdown the MySQL service while the backup runs. Am I stuck with using
mysqldump's --lock-all-tables option?
The issue with that is, we have many services that will be spinning
waiting to write to the DB as the tables will be locked. On large sets,
(MB and GB) this can take a while, and the issues then compound. If we
lock a single table, then we have integrity issues as some tables will
have data and others will be locked.
AFAIK, Oracle, SQL Server and any other production quality RDBMS does
this type of thing on live production servers without shutting down the
database or the services.
Thx.
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