How Facebook Handles Back-up

Facebook has developed a three stage back-up strategy for maintain high-availability of its massive MySQL installation across thousand of servers in multiple geographic regions.

In this blog posting, Facebook's Eric Barrett describes the Binary logs and mysqldump (Stage 1), Hadoop DFS (Stage 2), and Long-term Storage (Stage 3) components that make up its strategy.  On the networking side, he notes that back-up system currently needs to move many petabytes per week.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-automated-backups/10151239431923920