title: how can I safely backup a huge database?
body: <p>I need to backup a Drupal database it is huge. So it has over 1500 tables (don't blame me, its a Drupal thing) and is 10GB in size.</p>
  
  <p>I couldn't do it with PHPMyAdmin, I just got an error when it started to build the .sql file.</p>
  
  <p>I want to make sure I wont break anything or take the server down or anything when I try to back it up. </p>
  
  <p>I was going to attempt a mysqldump on my server and then copy the file down locally but realised that this may cause unforeseen problems. So my question to you is, is it safe to use mysqldump on so many tables at once and even if it is safe are there any problems such a huge file could lead to in the future for rebuilding the database?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for the input guys.</p>