throttling mysqldump

[Mike Lovell]

William Attwood wrote:
> I was hoping that was a given.  I should have explained better.  Flush
> tables, shut down MySQL, and then tarball the entire data folder.
> -Will
>   
An option that was explored where I work was have the MySQL tables on a 
LVM volume, stop the server, create and LVM snapshot, start the server, 
mount the snapshot, tar it, and then destroy the snapshot. It is a half 
way decent option. The server is only down for a few moments while the 
LVM snapshot is being created. But it of course has a prerequisite that 
you are running the MySQL tables on an LVM volume and there is a 
performance hit during the time the snapshot exists.

Other option that I would suggest is having MySQL sync data to a slave 
box and then doing regular backups on the slave. It does require having 
another machine though and that isn't always an option.

Mike