Hi,

I have a db running 24/7 with innodb tables. I need to make online (hot) backups, but I don't want to use commercial software to do so. My solution is to use replication across two hard drives so that I can stop the slave once in a while to do a regular db dump.

Does anyone see any problems with this? Is this a common use of replication?

I'm worried about replication stability (having two databases in sync during heavy load). I'm also worried about performance hit if writes >> reads.

Thanks in advance.

* Windows Server 2003
* dual opteron with 2GB ram
* two 15K rpm u320 scsi drives
* MySQL 4.0.16