The Boston MySQL User Group was lucky enough to get Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups.

Direct play the video at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/play

Direct download the video (351 MB) at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/download

Links referred to in the presentation:

MyLVMBackup by Lenz Grimmer
http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/

InnoDB Hot Backup:
Prices are at:
http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/
and at the time of this writing are:
1-Year License € 390 USD$ 605 per server
Perpetual License € 990 USD$ 1540 per server

Zmanda
prices are at: http://network.zmanda.com/shop/home.php?cat=1,3
Current prices are between the range of $100-$450, and a license is needed for each server and each client. So if you have 1 server and 3 clients, you need 4 licenses.

Online Backup
This is interesting reading about online backup, an article about how the online backup works at: http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/05/19/mysql-60-feature-2-online-backup/

This page (at the bottom, under “Replication”) states that the desired behavior is that the binary log does not log the restore or the backup. However, it does state that this is not implemented yet, nor even decided upon.

There’s also a great page on Online Backup at the MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/OnlineBackup

And if you’re short on time, the manual has a short page at http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It was mentioned that some people use a code repository to backup their database: http://krow.livejournal.com/593424.html