There is one important thing regarding backups for MySQL, IT IS ENGINE DEPENDENT, which means that different engines are using different methods to provide backups. Before we start to speak about backups we should set up some common terms. In nutshell there are 3 types of backups:
As for data content type there are two:
And as a data access type (the way we access the data for the backup) there are again two:
A backup can be: Online, Full and Physical, depending on the engine capabilities.