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,

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