Alternatives to Zmanda for MySQL backups?

Question

I don't have a problem with Zmanda but i wonder if there is any better or popular solutions out there other than doing it by hand.

My requirements are:

• Online backups
• The tool should decide to use mysqldump or mysqlhotcopy depending on the database
• Verify integrity of backups
• Send status emails
• Clean old backups (optional)
• Be able to choose between incremental or full backups (optional)

Replication seems to be the "best way to do backups" but I'm not gonna do that on this project.

Answer 1

i know it does not fully answer your question but anyway:

• lvm - based snapshots + rdiff-backup or anything else to make differential backup [ it's brutal, it might fail you but tends to work for me ]
• xtrabackup - free & opensource from percona - young but promising, provides ability to run live full and incremental backups of innodb

for all of those you'll need to put some scripts around, i'm happy user of backupninja that i use as wrapper for my scripts. backupninja will mail you when things fail, will log output of commands etc.

take a look here as well.