My task is to build an offsite backup system for my firm. Naturally, I will be using *NIX with some variant of rsync. The problem is that the server is running M$SQL (under XP Pro) rather than MySQL on *NIX. I have read enough to know that naively doing an rsync will not store a consistent snapshot of the db files. Any tips?

Thank you for considering this question.

Best regards,
Ross

So, the question is whether your firm has a budget for backup. Rsync is good for some situations. If you have multiple servers and want backups that include on site for easy restore and off site for disaster recovery, then you are getting beyond rsync. M$SQL will also require something else. Try digging into backup solutions starting with http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup and http://www.backupcentral.com/. There are obviously lots of other places to look, and I don't know how much you've gotten into it yet.

Depending on your needs, you might consider Amanda (links in above). One interesting feature is the recent addition of support for Amazon S3 for off site backup. Also, the Amanda Enterprise edition has support for corporate microsoft environments. If the community edition serves your needs, it is open source. If you need the corporate support, Amanda Enterprise is about 1/5 the cost of the most common commercial backup applications.

I use rsnapshot, which uses rsync, ssh and can run scripts to perform db backups.