How to better backup MySQL 5.6 database?

Today I had an issue where I accidentally deleted a whole table (which cascaded to a few other tables) due to a funky piece of MySQL syntax, see here . Luckily I had a backup from midnight, however all data was lost between midnight and to when I deleted all the rows in my table. How can I better back up my database to be more up to date with the live system, or perhaps better just lagging a hour behind it? I've seen people mention replication and binary logs but this is all kind of new to me. From my understanding, having a replication setup, deleting my table in the master would also delete in the slave database? Would I be better off trying to take hourly differential backups? Or should i just do full backups every hour? Our database is tiny, less than a gig, and we have room so it's feasible, but I would rather do things a proper way that would work for larger databases as well.