What's the simplest way to efficiently backup and especially undo UPDATE operations in a MySQL db?

I figured it would be easy to just insert a new row in some sort of history table using PHP, (containing date, table, column, value etc) on each UPDATE operation, but having MySQL do that automatically in some way would be way more efficient. Also, the restoring part could be simply a (quite unefficient) PHP script, unless it could be done with a开发者_JAVA技巧 single query (not sure how)

Thanks in advance

MySQL Reference Manual :: Using Triggers