From: Daevid Vincent Date: July 30 2007 11:52pm Subject: Best way to backup three live databases List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/208330 Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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.