Originally Posted by houkouonchi

AK, is there a reason why you don't convert the mysql tables to innodb (assuming they are myisam) and do mysqldump with --single-transaction to prevent the tables from being locked so you don't have the site go down during the mysqldump?

I work for a web-hosting company and our central database is over 100GB. Its not really feasible to have downtime during backup so most of our stuff is innodb. Another option is to have two mysqld's (would use more disk I/O if you don't have another server to run it on) and do mysql replication and then just run the dump on the slave.