How to ensure the safety of the database?

Question

MySQL

Prompt a correct way of the organization of safety of a database. It is clear that you need to do backups, but the most interesting question is how to organize this business continuously. On non-critical projects, I made a cron backup once a day and merged it onto a separate server. In which case, I will lose the maximum data for the day. Of course, this interval can be reduced, but there are still windows when the data does not have time to get to the copy. How are such moments solved on real projects, especially if there are payment data in the database?

Answer 1

You can talk about some kind of reliability with at least 2 (and preferably more) physical servers.
Then we set up master-slave replication, if there is payment data, then in the most paranoid synchronous mode.
The request will not be completed until the data is saved to the 2nd server.
upd
2 cool reports (albeit not quite on this topic):
www.slideshare.net/profyclub_ru/mailru-group-41346...
www.slideshare.net/profyclub_ru/my-sql-sphinx?qid=...