The first one would be hard to do without writing code. Thats probably what the googler intended, but of course not how a sysadmin is going to approach the pro

The first one would be hard to do without writing code. Thats probably what the googler intended, but of course not how a sysadmin is going to approach the problem. The second one would be a mix of xtrabackup and/or lvm (or san) snapshots on a slave. I've read this particular guy's blog a bunch of times before (its thin pickings out in the sysadmin blogosphere). His rush to the 90% answer bias is almost certainly a byproduct of his work environment, a small shop where ordering laptops is more a part of his day than performance tuning the website infrastructure. When your job covers a large variety and volume of relatively low-end problems, you would of course develop that reflex.