How to "properly" back up a MySQL/MariaDB database? I have a small (&lt;10GB) database backing an Intranet WSGI website. In the Apache logs I frequently see timeout errors whose timestamp coincides with the daily backup cron job. I'm running incremental backup on /var/lib/mysql using duplicity. My questions:

1) Is this a coincidence, or is it possible to have interference here?

2) Is there a better way to do a database backup?

Host is RHEL7
You should use mysqldump, for example if you want to backup all databases:

# mysqldump --all-databases &gt; dump.sql


You might need to add options for username, password, etc. Read the online documentation on mysqldump (MySQL Reference Manual) for other options.

If you just copy the database files while the server is running, it is very likely that you will be unable to restore databases using those files.