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Is there any comparative advantage in terms of best practice, ease of use, or speed in terms of using the drush back up and migrate command (drush bam) or is it just preference?
I'm often using just a simple drush sql-dump > exportdb.sql and a $(drush sql-connect) < importdb.sql to backup a database. I find it pretty easy to use.
There aren't giant differences between the two approaches. Here are a few small differences:
drush sql-dump uses mysqldump program in the background and so is must faster than the pure PHP approach taken by BAM.
You can easily skip tables with sql-dump as well. See the help for this command.
Finally, some folks might want to use sql-sync which does all of these steps in one command. It works faster than sql-dump+sql_connect when one of the machines is remote. It also includes optional data sanitization.
I think the biggest advantages of bam-backup is that you can choose a profile. With this you can do a bunch of different things. The most useful is the ability to exclude the rows from the cache and watchdog tables. I also think (though I have never confirmed it), that taking a backup this way will use maintenance mode just like via the UI, if you have it configured. This can result in better backups if you have active traffic.
When I am doing normal backups as safeties, I just use bam-backup. When I am doing a neuritic backup, or sending a db to a client for deployment, I also take a full backup with MySQL Administrator, which will properly lock tables.
