Re: Setting up replication in a Windows Sever 2003 environment

[Rick James]

Case 1: Lots of data on Master, and none of the other cases apply:
You MUST take a "consistent" snapshot of the data to build the Slave. This will take a time purportional to the data size. Such a dump can be done with either
* mysqldump (set the argument to have it do 'FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK' for you);
* Stop mysqld & copy the directory tree.

Case 2: You build the Slave when there was no data on the Master:
Not a problem.

Case 3: You have created a "logical volume" on the Master (probably not an option on that old of an OS):
You can stop mysqld; take a LVM snapshot; start mysqld; then copy the data at your leisure. This will take only a minute or so of downtime.

Case 4: All your tables are InnoDB, and you can use Xtrabackup (See Percona).

Case 5: You already have a Slave that is in sync with the Master:
Clone that slave -- it means downtime for the Slave, but not for the Master.

Bottom line: If you did not "plan ahead", you are stuck with a lengthy outage.