MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials

MySQL has no single unbreakable backup solution. There are several choices from included or optional open source dump utilities, and commercial offerings from Oracle and third parties. Are you using the right approach for your data availability and recoverability needs? The choice of the storage engine, and underlying way of storing and retrieving data is a foreign concept for the Oracle DBA. These have different locking strategies and automatic crash recovery concerns.
Simple steps can be used in the audit and review of your MySQL system to indicate a practical solution. Knowing what additional requirements for backup of configuration and binary logs (aka archive redo logs) are needed, and how to operate the recovery process including data access, verification and most importantly timing are all MySQL backup and recovery fundamentals a DBA that is supporting MySQL either willingly or unwillingly needs to know.