Siju George wrote:
ome of the folders I want to backup regularly is /var/lib/mysqlbuthttp://edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/dirvish_backup/snapshot.html 2.3. Practical Considerations says Relational Database Systems (RDBMS) cannot be backed up while live.
This is just a fact of life, true for any backup system. It depends what guarantees of integrity you need and what table types you're using. I use InnoDB and want error-free backups so I just send '/etc/init.d/mysql stop' as my 'pre-client' command and '/etc/init.d/mysql start' afterwards. An alternative is to run a mysql replica. I recommend 'High Performance MySQL' by Zawodny & Balling for a survey of issues and techniques.
I use dirvish rather than amanda because I can do some specific tricks with dirvish and because I felt amanda is way more complicated than I wanted. YMMV :)
Cheers, Dave