We use Percona's XtraDB streaming backup to take backups of our smaller databases, and incremental backups of the larger DBs. We store them in a series of place

We use Percona's XtraDB streaming backup to take backups of our smaller databases, and incremental backups of the larger DBs. We store them in a series of places: on a backup instance within east-1, on a second dedicated backup instance in west-1 (in case east-1 ever bites the dust completely, such as during hurricane Sandy), and then long-term archival on S3. S3 is good for smaller databases but for our biggest ones it takes multiple hours to download a full archive, hence the backups in multiple places. However, our primary strategy for uptime is redundancy -- every db has at least one slave, and we are spread across multiple availability zones.