DB dumps exist for a reason Indeed they do, and that is the "faultless" way of creating a backup. Depending on your RDMS (and luck perhaps), the backups can be

DB dumps exist for a reason Indeed they do, and that is the "faultless" way of creating a backup. Depending on your RDMS (and luck perhaps), the backups can be fine or they can be unusable. In my experience, MySQL databases backed up this way almost always end up being corrupted. On the other hand, I've had good success with PostgreSQL. Sure, occasionally the internal registry indices will be out of sync and will need to be recreated, but it has never been a big deal. Even still, I wasn't decrying DB-level backups since, obviously, they're far better (and sometimes necessary). But you can still start a cronjob to write the backup and let the snapshots take care of the rest. My point is, you already get heavy-duty compression and incremental algorithms and restoration, not to mention the ability to restore the complete system state in the event of a catastrophe.