Backups are an integral and very important part of any system. Backups allow you to recover your data and be up and running again, in the advent of problems such as system crashes, hardware failures or users deleting data by mistake. I had been evaluating backup solution for a while but to be honest I really wasn't satisfied with the solutions available until I came across XtraBackup and I am loving it since. In this post I intend on showing how to do backups and restores using XtraBackup.

The open-source xtrabackup tool from Percona brings much needed hot backup functionality to MySQL deployments.  In this database journal article we discuss logical, cold, and hot backups, then explain how to use xtrabackup on your MyISAM, InnoDB, and XtraDB tables to create at-the-ready backups.  We then take you through the step-by-step process to restore them, and even the process of point-in-time recovery too.

Database Journal – Hotbackups with Percona’s Xtrabackup

Although MyISAM has been the default storage engine for MySQL but its soon going to change with the release of MySQL server 5.5. Not only that, more and more people are shifting over to the Innodb storage engine and the reasons for that is the tremendous benefits, not only in terms of performance, concurrency, ACID-transactions, foreign key constraints, but also because of the way it helps out the DBA with hot-backups support, automatic crash recovery and avoiding data inconsistencies which can prove to be a pain with MyISAM. In this article I try to hammer out the reasons why you should move on to using Innodb instead of MyISAM.

Firstly, I have to thank my co-workers Singer Wang and Gerry Narvaja for doing a lot of the work that resulted in this comparison.

After running both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, we have found that there is a measurable but not large difference between the resources that Xtrabackup and InnoDB Hot Backup consume.

Xtrabackup:

• Free


• takes 1.1% longer (2 min during a 3 hour backup)


• uses 1.4% more space (1G more in a 70G backup — this was for uncompressed backups)


• uses 1.115% more cpu overall


• split as 0.12% user, 0.66% nice, 0.025% system, 0.31% more iowait,

  [Read more...]

As Baron points out, Percona’s Xtrabackup tool can be used just like InnoDB Hot Backup.

Many are wondering, “is it good enough?” In fact, I wondered the same thing, and after a few weeks of using and testing Xtrabackup (on machines that have MyISAM and InnoDB tables), I can say:

0) We have not run into any problems with backing up InnoDB tables; on the machines we’ve run it on (RHEL 5.3 and Debian) it has been stable.

1) We were able to use one of the binaries provided by Percona — we did not have to compile anything. Binaries are provided for 64-bit versions of Linux

2) Innobackupex is the script analogous to Innobackup. Basically, this is a wrapper script for

  [Read more...]