In a previous post I had mentioned that I was doing a bit of digging into Docker in order to get a better grasp of the technology. Part of that was exploring common administrative tasks. I would venture to say that backups are probably among the most important tasks we take on with database administration, so it’s important to know how to do this for Docker MySQL instances.
There is a fair bit of documentation on how to handle this logically (mysqldump / mydumper) as this is a simple task to perform as long as you can connect to the database instance, so I wanted to approach physical backups using the very common xtrabackup tool. Additionally, we’re trying to think with containers here, so I wanted to make sure that not only would I be taking a backup of the Docker container MySQL instance, but I would do it with another Docker container running …
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