Best way to backup to a remote server?

[dzeanah]

We're at the point where mysqldumps are in excess of 3 gigs, and there's not enough space on the device to gzip it at that point.

Up until now I've been dumping to the FS and using rsnapshot to synch it offsite. Now that space is becoming an issue (to put off an upgrade for a while) Im looking for a better solution.

I'd try a mysqldump over SSH to just deposit the sql file on a remote system, but I'm scared of how unresponsive the board would be while this process was running.

Is there a better way? The board is fairly busy (3 million posts, about 1,200 members online) during non-peak hours, so I've been dumping Sunday mornings to reduce the impact on the server.

[Jake Bunce]

The dump is always created on the localhost first before you can move it anywhere. You will need to free up space or install a larger hard drive.

[dzeanah]

I guess I wasn't clear.

What options are there that don't require adding a new hard drive or clearing up space in the short term? Is mirroring the database to another server viable from a performance perspective? If so, can the mirror be broken before the dump, or better, can it just be re-synched once a week so there's no ongoing performance penalty to running the mirrir? How about copying the "raw" database files through a utility is made to do so? What kind of performance penalty is there to dumping to a NFS share over a 100 Mbit link, assuming gigabytes of files?

I'm certain there are a number of viable options for this task; I'm just looking for hints as to what might have the best set of trade-offs.

[Jake Bunce]

I don't know of any method to backup directly to a different computer other than a PHP script that downloads to the client, but that type of backup tends to be unreliable.

[dzeanah]

OK.

Thanks.