Shutting down the slave (cleanly) is also safe because it keeps track of where it left off. Unclean shutdowns might produce problems, especially if the disk cache was not flushed to disk before the system went down. Your system fault tolerance is greatly increased if you have a good uninterruptible power supply. Unclean shutdowns of the master may cause inconsistencies between the content of tables and the binary log on the master; this can be avoided by using InnoDB tables and the --innodb_safe_binlog option on the master. See Section 5.2.3, “The Binary Log”.