With a MySQL database, is there a way of logging and/or backing up incremental changesets?
We have a number of large databases (100-200 GB), for which we take daily backups using mysqldump. These backups are a snapshot of the entire database, which can be restored as whole. However, taking/restoring from these backups is not a quick process.
As such, I'd like to be able to take backups of incremental changes - i.e. a backup of what's changed in a given day. Then, assuming a database was in a state consistent with a previous snapshot, we could restore the set of incremental changes to get it to the same/current state.
To some extent, this could be done by operating on mysqldump files - i.e. comparing today's snapshot dump with the previous day's snapshot dump to create a .sql backup of commands to run to convert from the previous snapshot state to today's snapshot state. However, I'd rather not write this myself if there's already a better way of doing this.
Also, I'm conscious that, to some degree this is analogous to MySQL master-slave replication, with the exceptions that the changesets are grouped by time period (i.e. a 24hr window) and not automatically read into another database / server. Furthermore, the binary logs are for the entire database server, not for individual databases.
Additional Comments:
With some further research on this, I've also come across the incremental backup functions in MySQL Enterprise, but we're not using the enterprise version.