Is it risky to be doing mysql dumps through phpMyAdmin on databases that are ‘live’? In my case these are a gallery (least likely to be active) blog (medium likely) and three phpbb forums (most likely). I want to make backups frequently, simply, and safely.
Would mysqlhotcopy be more appropriate or is that overkill or innappropriate? I’m not entirely sure about the relationship of the database servers and my ‘home’ directory, in terms of what path I’d use. Example:
mysqlhotcopy db_name --user=username --password=password --allowold --quiet --flushlog [/path/to/new_directory]
Is that path/to/new/directory one of my usual ‘local’ paths or is it specific to the database machine itself?