The Zmanda suite has some scripts to simplify backups. The open release just uses mysqldump, but you can download a zrm-xtrabackup plugin here.

Once installed xtrabackup and zmanda recovery mysql just put the zrm-xtrabackup plugin in /usr/share/mysql-zrm/plugins/.

With xtrabackup you can:
1. create a raw backup into /var/lib/mysql-zrm/BackupSet1/20120716154427

# full=0;incremental=1; export full incremental
# mysql-zrm –action backup –backup-level $full –mysql-binlog-path /var/log/mysql/

2. create an incremental backup

# mysql-zrm –action backup –backup-level $incremental –mysql-binlog-path /var/log/mysql/

The incremental backup dumps the binlogs created since the last full backup.

3. check backup status with

# mysql-zrm-reporter

The missing stuff is a way to effectively check the backup files. While zrm provides a mysql-zrm-verify, it just checks the md5 of the files, not if the backup files are effectively usable under mysql.