how safe is it to rsync databases?

[Veronica Hill]

On 15 Apr 2006, at 02:49, Christoph Biedl wrote:

> 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.

If I was running a MySQL DB then i would definitely use the slave 
feature and replicate it to another server.  Unfortunatley for me the 
database frontend has to use either IBM's C-ISAM DB or Oracle.  We use 
the C-ISAM backend.  But I did some tests after Tony replied to me off 
list with some pointers and found that using bcheck - a C-ISAM db 
checker after an rsync came up clean; no errors.  But that's doing it 
at 0100hrs when no one is working.  i'm not game to do it during 
business hours.

Bye Rony.