Obviously I deeply offended you, Mr. Junior Member, Although it was not my intention to do so. From your initial post I concluded that export was your main backup scheme and that you might not be aware of the consequences. Obviously you are, however your boss is not, and you failed to explain to him why taking full exp 4 times a day is idiotic.

You say you are 7x24 shop. OK, but there are couple of things that contradict this. For example, your shop obviously can afford to loose 6 hours worth of data! And you said you also do cold backlups - how can you do them in 7x24 schedule? And in the case of failure, if you are relying on exports obviously you can afford to be down for about half a day (appart from loosing 6 hours data). If your (conventional) export is taking an hour to export, then it will take at least 3 hours to import it. And before that you will have to create the whole new database to import into. This might take another 3 hours or even more.

You say you are also doing hot backups, and that is the right way to go in 7x24, but if this is so, I realy can't understand the reason for doing full exp 4 times a day. Your boss might thing he has his valid reasons for this, but he definitelly is wrong, and you should put more effort to make him understand this.

Once again - taking full exp every 6 hours is ludicrous if you ask me. I can't find any valid reason for doing it in 7x24 environment. And I can find strong reasons aginst doing it. But, hey, it's your database.