Linked tables change during dump Having difficulty cloning a live DB.  In the table structure i have a number of tables that extend are linked from one another, they are quite big and the names means the tables aren't very close in the listing.

An example of what happens when I mysqldump is the last record in table A has ID 123123 then by the time the dump gets to table Z, the ID's in the live system have jumped to 123234.  The knock on effect is that when I try to use my newly cloned DB in my development environment I get a lot of duplicate ID errors.

A few questions, is there a way to lock groups of tables for a dump (don't want to lock the whole db as its ~5GB and its too long to be offine) Or is there a nice way to clean up orphaned IDs that get created this way.
InnoDB?  Or MyISAM?  Or a mixture?

If MyISAM, why are you not moving to InnoDB?

Look at the arguments to mysqldump.  One says to lock all the MyISAM tables for the duration of the dump.  (This, of course, is nasty for updates/inserts.)  Another says to "lock" InnoDB tables as a --single-transaction.  (This is not so nasty.)

Xtrabackup (see percona.com) is an alternative to mysqldump and an excellent way to backup a live system of InnoDB tables.  So is MySQL Enterprise Backup ($$).