Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

mysqlhotcopy

mysqlhotcopy is a Perl script that uses a combination of LOCK TABLES, FLUSH TABLES, and Unix cp to perform a fast backup of the database. It simply copies the raw database files to another location. Because it does only a file copy, it is much faster than mysqldump. And because the copy is in native format, the backup is not portable to other hardware or operating systems, except for MyISAM tables, which are portable. Also, mysqlhotcopy can be run only on the same host as the database, whereas mysqldump can be executed remotely.

To run mysqlhotcopy, type:

$ mysqlhotcopy test /usr/backups

This command creates a new directory in the /usr/backups directory that has a copy of all the data files in the test database.

If you are using binary logging, you will also want to specify --flushlog, so the binary logs get checkpointed at the time of the backup.