MySQL setting up database replication
Database replication is one of those useful things that can really make your life simpler. It’s not really a way of backing up the data in a MySQL database, because if you inadvertently issue a command to delete the entire database, it won’t save you from yourself…. it will faithfully replicate the change to the slave servers. However, in the event of hardware failure or other abrupt disruption of connectivity, the concept of replicating from a master to a slave server is ideal.
How-to forge has a good writeup on how to get this kind of replication setup.