[ Thanks to Falko
Timme for this link. ]
“This article describes how you can back up MySQL databases
without interrupting the MySQL service. Normally, when you want to
create a MySQL backup, you either have to stop MySQL or issue a
read lock on your MySQL tables in order to get a correct backup; if
you don’t do it this way, you can end up with an inconsistent
backup. To get consistent backups without interrupting MySQL, I use
a little trick: I replicate my MySQL database to a second MySQL
server, and on the second MySQL server I use a cron job that
creates regular backups of the replicated database…”