[dangrossman]

I take the snapshots. I also have servers send backups to each other each night. I also have a nightly cron job run and rotate backups of the most critical databases to an external drive on my home network. A Tonido Plug does that job (Ubuntu on a tiny ARM server in a plug that costs virtually nothing to run).

Now, some of the databases are simply too large or under too much load to take a live backup while the sites are running. Those I run on Amazon RDS with the MultiAZ feature enabled. There should be two copies of the database running at all times, both servers keeping a 3 day binlog for point-in-time backups, and making a nightly snapshot to S3. I have to rely on Amazon for that.

But I still take daily home backups of the most valuable individual tables off those servers, like user registrations and payment records. Even if I can't have off-site backups of the whole database, I'll have off-site copies of the part I'd need most in case of an Amazon-entirely-offline catastrophe.