We just published a technical document about what to consider for backup and recovery of the remote MySQL server, for example, when your online forums and wiki are located at managed hosting service provider.
For any database backup the primary considerations are the consistency of the backup and impact on users and applications. A backup of the remote MySQL, however, has extra challenges related to:
- network usage
- security, and
- flexibility of recoverability of MySQL data to a different host.
We discuss the trade-offs to consider, and describe how to use Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for several common scenarios. For example, we provide HOWTO for a use case when you want to ensure security of backup data on the wire and at rest.