Backing up large MySQL DB for DR purposes Fundamentally I am just trying to come up with the best way to back up my MySQL DB nightly.  Complicated by the fact that:

its a 400 gb DB and growing
its running on windows
I am not permitted any real downtime

I have two replication servers going which I used mysqldump with a read lock to get going and I plan to implement any back-up strategy from a slave.

I have thought about setting up an additional replication server and running percona xtrabackup from it but I am not sure what my recovery strategy might look like taking back-ups from a linux box to restore on windows.

mysqldump is no longer a good strategy as the full process dump/zip/move/restore is 2 days at this point.

it's innoDB with a few myisam log tables mixed in.

looking for any insight or direction from those that have gone down this road already.  Any options outside of oracles enterprise back-up?

thanks
xtrabackup from a slave will work fine.

If you apply redo log on a linux machine(innobackupex --apply-log) you can use the restored datadir on windows.