Something a little more high tech, like running MySQL on top of a file system that does synchronous replication.
You don't even need your own engineering to do better than daily mysqldumps. Run your MySQL instance on Amazon RDS and you get synchronous replication to a hot standby instance (that's not MySQL's async replication, no delay and no overhead), and the ability to take consistent snapshots from the standby server at any time. The snapshots will be incremental since they live on S3 where duplicate chunks aren't duplicated, and don't load your database server while they're taken because they're copied off the standby.
> Something a little more high tech, like running MySQL on top of a file system that does synchronous replication.
You can't guarantee a consistent snapshot from the file system alone for Innodb. You need some other logic on top which is exactly what Xtrabackup provides.
RDS certainly isn't going to work for Facebook, but in order to achieve their fast snapshot feature RDS is almost certainly using LVM snapshots.
LVM snapshots can be a better option than mysqldump but LVM snapshots are local and therefore require enough space to take the snapshot and keep it for the time it would take to copy it off box. This can be a big problem as you can't rely on your snapshot to always work. Also, using an LVM snapshot requires a 'flush table with with read locks' command to be run while the snapshot is in progress which can bring in its own issues.
You can actually use LVM on a live InnoDB instance as long as both the logs and tablespace reside on the same volume. There is no locking required.
We actually used LVM at Facebook for MySQL backups for a while, however as you stated it requires at least double local space. In addition it is also a real nightmare on performance when it is running since it is double writing data locally to disk. So basically you need to run at < 50% utilization for some extended period of time to be able to take a snapshot successfully. We run much higher than that 24/7.
When you aren't disk performance or space constrained then LVM snapshots can be a very good option.
The problem with the solutions you mentioned is that it requires double provisioning hardware. When you have just a few MySQL servers, buying a few extra isn't a big deal. When you have X,000 MySQL servers, buying X,000 * 2 is a huge deal and not a nice scalable way to do backups.
