CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This should probably be a question in a MySQL forum but I believe it is one that is of general interest to those setting up a CiviCRM environment.

We have a dev/test server that has copies of the production database used for different purposes. One of those is for reporting and is used mostly by a member of our team that writes custom MySQL statements for various reports. I also tend to use this instance for testing.

The problem is, if one of my tests fails and I corrupt or delete too many records from the CiviCRM tables, I need to reload everything from a mysqldump table and that takes at least 2-3 hours.

All of these dev/test instances are in a single directory /var/lib/mysql and the InnoDB tables are in one tablespace.

I need some suggestions on the best way to go about creating a backup that could be reloaded quickly, let's say under one hour. I have read the MySQL documentation there there seems to be many options so I would like to find out if anyone on these forums has some valuable tips.