I don't have a problem with Zmanda but i wonder if there is any better or popular solutions out there other than doing it by hand.
My requirements are:
- Online backups
- The tool should decide to use mysqldump or mysqlhotcopy depending on the database
- Verify integrity of backups
- Send status emails
- Clean old backups (optional)
- Be able to choose between incremental or full backups (optional)
Replication seems to be the "best way to do backups" but I'm not gonna do that on this project.
I know this does not fully answer your question, but anyway:
For all of those, you'll need to put some scripts around. I'm ha appy user of backupninja, which I use as wrapper for my scripts. backupninja will mail you when things fail, will log output of commands etc.
Take a look here as well.