how safe is it to rsync databases?

[Christoph Biedl]

Julian Pace Ross wrote...

> I'm interested to hear feedback on this, since I was intending to backup a
> mySQL database 'on the fly' daily...

If you can afford to shutdown mysqld during the backup, rsync is not a
problem. I do a daily mysqldump(*) and backup these dump files only.
A completely different approach was to use the "slave" feature of mysql
for replication. Details are beyond the scope of this list but can be
found in the documentation.

    Christoph

(*) ToDo: Check whether mysqldump is actually an atomic operation.