Take full backup from slave and retain ability to do Point-in-Time Recovery? (3 replies)

Hello there.

I am currently taking a daily snapshot of the master database using mysqlhotcopy. I am using this with the --flush-log option so that I am able to do a Point-in-Time recovery using the snapshot and the subsequent binary logs (as described here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/backup-methods.html).

I would like to switch to taking the backup snapshot from the slave so that there is no impact on the master during backup, and I also want to switch to using mysqldump instead of mysqlhotcopy, so that we can use InnoDB tables. method is described here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/replication-solutions-backups-mysqldump.html

My question is if I switch to taking the backup on the slave how can I flush the binary logs on the master at the point that the backup is taken? I want to retain the ability to do a Point-in-Time Recovery and if I can't identify the point at which I need to start replaying the binary logs after recovering the full backup this would make the Point-in-Time Recovery extremely difficult and / or risk data loss.

Thanks for any advice!