Is there a 100% secure way to prevent the loss of mySQL data?

[vigour]

I have mySQL running on a Mac mini. I have a php script that are using mysqldump to backup my whole database. This script is called once every 24 hours from CronniX. It works great but...

What if the database gets corrupt in between the backups? I suppose my customers are going to loose their latest data then. Even if I run the script once every hour my customers will still loose data.

Is there a 100% secure way to prevent the loss of mySQL data?

[vigour]

I just found out that I can do a mysqlhotcopy isntead of a mysqldump. That is a better way because it's very fast. I have tried to call mysqlhotcopy from php but the backup file is empty. Can someone please tell me what is wrong?

$command = "/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqlhotcopy $db_user $db_pass $db_name '/mysql/'.$filename";

[sneakyimp]

the short answer to your original post: NO.

what's with the quotes in your command? try echoing your command out instead of executing it and you'll see it has the single quotes in the wrong place and also a period that you don't want. maybe try this instead:

$command = "/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqlhotcopy $db_user $db_pass $db_name '/mysql/$filename'";

As for the issue of the db getting corrupted and then you making a backup of it, you should set up your script to make a backup with the date built in to the backup name so you get a different filename each day. Eg., /mysql/YYYY-MM-dd-backup-filename where YYYY-MM-DD is the current date of the backup. Obviously your hard drive will eventually fill up so you should set up this script to delete the older backups after some time period -- say a week or two.