This is a simple way to backup your MySQL tables to Amazon S3 for a nightly backup - this is all to be done on your server :-)

this is for Centos 5.6, see http://s3tools.org/repositories for other systems like ubuntu etc

# Install s3cmd
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://s3tools.org/repo/CentOS_5/s3tools.repo
yum install s3cmd
# Setup s3cmd
s3cmd --configure
    # You’ll need to enter your AWS access key and secret key here, everything is optional and can be ignored :-)

Upload a copy of s3mysqlbackup.sh (it will need some tweaks for your setup), make it executable and test it

# Add the executable bit
chmod +x s3mysqlbackup.sh
# Run the script to make sure it's all tickety boo
./s3mysqlbackup.sh

Assuming the backup script is stored in /var/www/s3mysqlbackup.sh we need to add a crontask to run it automatically:

# Edit the crontab
env EDITOR=nano crontab -e
    # Add the following lines:
    # Run the database backup script at 3am
    0 3 * * * bash /var/www/s3mysqlbackup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

If for some reason you put this script in a public folder (not sure why you would do this), you should add the following to your .htaccess or httpd.conf file to prevent public access to the files:

### Deny public access to shell files
<Files *.sh>
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</Files>