Foreign keys / Transactions in MySQL.. WTF?

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 12:40:24AM -0500, Jonathan T. Rockway wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 07:53:28PM +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote:
[...]
>> That's what filesystem/block-device level snapshots are for.
> Does MySQL guarantee that the filesystem is in a legal state at all times?
> If not, a filesystem-level backup is just going to give you garbage.

No, not even when it's stopped :)

The normal technique is to either stop the database and back it up, which is
usually impractical, or create a LVM snapshot and then back the snapshot up.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/backup-file.html is for PostgreSQL
but the same general technique applies to MySQL too.