Best way to backup?

[Regs]

I have made a post on the official support forums

The majority of the customers will never encounter this problem, only when they try to move to 4.1.

The majority? How the heck would you know this? I upgraded to a MySQL v4.x last year (straight from v3.x.x whatever)... I had been doing mysqldump's all the time since... and only now do I know that they were useless backups if I valued my attachments/images in the database.

I was and still am angry because I found out that, as you said, Jelsoft was aware of the problem and did not warn customers about the potential problems. I was affected by this 'bug' greatly. I lost over 5 years worth of "data".

Now, as I see it, you are pushing a user here to use the mysqldump facility to back-up their database. You did not warn the user at all that there could be a serious potential problem, a problem that you admit you are aware of.

Jelsoft has identified the problem and have provided the necessary "fix" of 3 queries to run. Why has this not been packaged up into an "patch/upgrade" file, posted in the members download area, and a E-bulletin sent out? It is Jelsoft's duty to protect all their customers. If there is a known issue and a fix for it is available made by Jelsoft, that needs to be conveyed to their customer base immediately through appropriate channels.

What is the difference between this and a PHP "bug" that can cause a security breach? Both can result in huge ammounts of data loss, no?

Now, my original post told the thread starter to be careful as there could be potential problems using the method(s) you linked to for backing up the database. This is a known fact.

But I will retract that statement and just let my fellow customer possibly lose data because apparently that is the more helpful thing to do here on vb.org