master / slave replication, backups and point-in-time recovery

[Shawn Beck]

Here is my situation. I have a master slave configuration. The master needs to be available 24/7, thus no table locks or going offline for consistent backups. The slave will be used for reporting and backups. A full nightly backup of the database will be made from the slave.

Question: Is it possible to use the relay logs from the master/slave replication to replay against the full backup made from the slave to have point-in-time recovery? OR it is necessary to turn on "log_slave_updates" to have the slave generate the same binary logging for this activity from which I can achieve point-in-time recovery?

It seems terribly inefficient to "log_slave_updates" to generate a binary log on the slave when the relay log seems to be the same thing.

Thanks in advance for any insight provided here.

Shawn Beck