We don’t use mySQL / Maria but I wouldn’t bother backing up OS files every time so you should have a script to boot up a fresh VM instance and restore data at t

We don’t use mySQL / Maria but I wouldn’t bother backing up OS files every time so you should have a script to boot up a fresh VM instance and restore data at the db level- perhaps use replication if you need fast RTO. This is a fairly solved problem as far as databases are concerned. If you run on AWS or can afford at least 3 nodes running you can even avoid downtime altogether.