[drupal-support] automatically do database backups?

[Anisa]

So, the other day, my server's database completely crashes.  They 
restored it, but you know..  scary stuff.  And of course, while I could 
imagine files mysteriously disappearing, and kept backups of all that, I 
never thought about the database, so I was backupless.

But it's a pain to manually do regular backups, any ideas on how to 
automate it?  I use mysql, and normally access it with phpmyadmin.  That 
is, if there are any good ideas that don't involve cron jobs.  ^.^:

Anisa.