I would like to move my forum database to a new server. However, the MySQL database is approximately 700 megs, and takes a great deal of time to import. Doing a mysql> source backup.sql took well over 12 hours the last time I did it, and that was months ago. It will most likely take much longer than that.

What is the best way to go about doing this? My current plans would be to lock all new registrations and posting on the site for about two days while I copied over the database on the other machine. Then, set up the site to use the new database. I would be making the site read-only so that new data isn't being added to the old database which will be lost as soon as I set up the forum to use the new database. However, there has to be a more seamless way of doing it than making the site read only for two days.

If I were to leave the forum active, I would end up at the end of the day with two databases, one of them two days fresher than the other. Is there a way that I could then just import those two days worth of data to the new database? It's probably too good to be true, but is there some sort of database comparison utility that would work in this case?