[drupal-support] automatically do database backups?

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.