[dundee] MySQL backup woes

[Kris Davidson]

Got a Dell Poweredge DX-250 (Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.40Ghz, 1GB ECC
DDR2 RAM, 160GB SATA 7,200RPM HD ) running Debian Lenny with the
2.6.26-2-686
kernel (previously upgraded from an Etch install). It doesn't really
run much - DNS, Apache and FTP. Its not under heavy load.

Anyway, I've been cleaning and sorting the server out and decided to
schedule some backups:

2,643,619 files into a 6GB archive
34 databases, 600MBs worth into a 100MB archive

Now the files backup in about 2 hours while the databases take 5
hours. The time seems excessive to me, I'm use to long backup times on
large databases (10GB+) but these don't seem all that large.

Anyone just wondering if anyone had advice or suggestions?

kris