Word of warning

A not carfully planned and configured replication may destroy your data!

Do read a lot of documentation before using these techniques on a production site. 

Setup replication

1. Setting up MySQL replication is an easy way to keep live backups between a production and development or hotspare. Here are some resources for doing this:

• Live Backups of MySQL Using Replication - http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/16/MySQLian.html
• MySQL Manual - 15.1.1. How to Set Up Replication - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication-howto.html

The my.ini file to edit is in /data/wre/etc/my.ini. If you are using innodb tables, you may want to also set the following options:

  # Per manual section 15.1.1.2
  innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
  sync_binlog=1

ToDo

1. We may need to look at turning off replication when running the backup.pl script. The OnLAMP article explains how to do this towards the end.