I've usually use mysqldump to export a database. However, when the database is really large, it seems much faster and less intensive to just gzip the database files directly without involving the MySQL deamon and copying that to the other database. 

eg: 

```
tar -czvf {db_name}.sql.tgz /var/lib/mysql/{db_name}

```

Is this a good method of doing this? What are the (dis)advantages?

I also read another post here that mentioned: 

```
rsync /var/lib/mysql/ ...

```

Would it be a good option to just use rsync to keep a backup db in sync with the development db?