Today I got bored and felt like improving FES's backups, so we now have the database backups being committed into a git repository instead of being dumped out to an ordinary file. (Don't worry, it's not a public git repo; your PMs haven't just been opened up to the world.)
One benefit of this is that we now have 1-minute increments on backups. git's excellent delta compression algorithm means that we can effectively take backups as frequently as we like without significant diskspace penalty, whereas before we only had 2-hour increments due to the enormous amount of diskspace needed to store lots of database dumps.
Another benefit is that we have persistent history; previously, we were expiring old backups after about three months. I've imported all our old backups into git, so we will always be able to restore the forum as far back as 7 December, 2013 if the need arises.
The final benefit, and the one that really tickles my fancy, is that we can now easily see exactly what changes were made to the database, and when. git makes it very easy to get diffs between commits, and since we're doing a backup every minute, we can get down-to-the-minute information on when someone's signature changed, or (perhaps more usefully) when SMF did something stupid with the database that we want to fix (and exactly what it did).
I'm leaving the old backup mechanism in place for the time being, just in case we find some problem with the new one, but it seems to be working well so far.