apricot,
It is all risk/benefit. I agree with Vinny. I think the way you are doing it is most likely OK. There are other backup programs that can do "real time" backups and work with databases.
Just a suggestion: You may want to compromose and do backups every four hours rather than every thirty minutes. Just a thought. You shouldn't be losing connection at all, and that is a symptom that something is up.
I understand your method, but just keep in mind that Vinny has been doing networking and databases for over 20 years from what I gather.
