Advise required on backup plan

[Jim Buckley-Barrett]

Hi,

Currently our database is 9GB and growing around 1GB a month. All the tables are MyISAM and our largest two tables have over 16 million records. We do a lot of INSERTS and UPDATES and very few deletes.

We’re currently using MySQLDump to create a midnight backup of the database but we are having issues with that recently which is causing our application to slow down considerably during the back up.

What I would like to do is create a full daily back up with differential backups as well as weekly and monthly backups - your normal backup schema, 6 days, 5 weeks, 12 months.

I've been considering replication but I don’t know for sure if I really need that.

So I’m looking for advice on what backup software to use?

Should I look at replication?

Should I be saving my backups to a separate drive to help with READ/WRITES?

Should the database be on its own drive for READ/WRITES?

Thanks,
Jim