ZRM for MySQL requires binary logging to be enabled on the MySQL server to do incremental backups. Enabling binary logs has minimal impact on MySQL performance. But, in an active database, the binary logs can grow to hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes.

ZRM of MySQL has multiple plugin interfaces to customize the backup and recovery process to user environment. One of the plugin interfaces is the post backup plugin. The binary logs are no longer required after a backup. The post backup plugin can purge the binary logs after the backup. This will allow the system administrators to balance between the need for …

DBA’s working in environments where MySQL database is for production critical applications are constantly pushed to their limits. Database Users and DBA’s are humans too. So, a dropped table here or a misconstrued MySQL statement there is not out of ordinary. Recovering from these kinds of user errors is extremely vital to production databases. Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, is a good way to recover from user errors. Consider this example - You [DBA] find out that an user has made an unforced error which is affecting your production database. You further find out that this has happened in the last half hour. Lucky for you, you use ZRM for MySQL in your environment to make nightly backups. You spring into action! You first verify that a nightly backup was run. You then make an incremental backup now. Using ZRM for MySQL, you identify the point at which the user …

Goal of a MySQL system administrator is to have regular, consistent backups of the
databases with minimal impact on the database application. The backup process should
also limit the use of CPU, memory, network resources so that application is not impacted.
Optimal backup method must be choosen to keep the backup window as small as possible.
The backup parameters depends on various factors - number and size of databases, number
of MySQL servers, MySQL configuration, data security.

ZRM for MySQL provides consolidated backup and recovery for MySQL databases. ZRM
for MySQL provides extensive list of options to tune the backup process for the user
environment. It also tracks lots of backup parameters that are available to the administrator
to tune the backup process.

…

Zmanda recovery manager for MySQL 1.1.2 is available from Zmanda downloads page. This release has been tested on Debian distribution and on MySQL server 4.0.24.

I want to acknowledge Thorsten Schifferdecker’s contribution to this release. He helped us by creating debian packages for earlier releases and provided good feedback on the product.

Lots of bugs have been fixed and this release has underwent more testing with different MySQL configurations.

Take a look at ZRM for MySQL wiki for changes, documentation, try it in your MySQL configuration and feel free to provide feedback on forums.

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So, I’ve been playing around with Amazon’s new S3 service. It’s essentially an on-demand storage-and-bandwidth combination; Amazon will scale their service transparantly to provide as much as you need of either. It’s pretty cheap, too, at $0.15 per GB per month for storage and $0.20 per GB per month for data transfer. I wanted to see what would be the best way to use Amazon S3 for backups with Amanda and MySQL ZRM, so I did some tests to evaluate the performance under various circumstances.

Amazon requires that you upload data in complete ‘objects’, and it wasn’t clear to me what the …

I had organized a session at MySQL camp on Saturday on the above topic. I should say I was one of the guilty ones who had slides for the session in an “unconference“.

Brian Aker (of MySQL) graciously stepped in to answer some questions and provided reasons for some of the design decisions in MySQL OnlineBackup. Some of them are:

• Envelope format for backup archive. This would allow backup as well as recovery to continue in case the storage engines failed to do backup or recovery respectively.

• Block size and envelope format will help in handling tape errors.

• Logical backup will be done in case storage engine does not have online backup API …

This is how Marten Mickos (MySQL CEO) described the relationship between MySQL and the open source community at MySQL Camp. MySQL Camp held at Google over last weekend, was an useful opportunity to listen and talk to developers in the broad MySQL ecosystem (including Oracle VP) as well as MySQL users.

The most interesting talk was about the efforts made by MySQL folks to attract and reward MySQL community contributors. They have made significant efforts in this direction - MySQL forge, Planet MySQL, MySQL winter of code, MySQL community server and availability of MySQL work logs (roadmap)

We, at Zmanda, also understand the need to have …

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There are several methods to do live MySQL database backups. These methods are either storage engine specific (InnoDB hot backup, mysqlhotcopy), or require read locks (mysqldump), or require additional hardware (backup using replication, LVM snapshot). Some of these backup methods can do backups of remote MySQL servers also. So far, there is no backup method that provides storage engine agnostic, consistent full backups of local and remote servers. Goal of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) of MySQL is to consolidate all these and future methods of MySQL backup and use the optimal method for the MySQL configuration.

One of the exciting developments in MySQL is the development of MySQL Online backup. The …

Yesterday, I was testing various backup and recovery methods supported by ZRM for MySQL before 1.1.1 release. ZRM for MySQL requires binary logging to be enabled on the MySQL server. I ran out of disk space during testing and removed the binary logs. Accidently, I deleted the last binary log used by MySQL server. MySQL server uses the most recent binary log.

I could not start MySQL server again.

# service mysqld start

061031 17:38:48  mysqld started
061031 17:38:48  InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 14 1645228884
/usr/libexec/mysqld: File '/var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin.000017' not found
(Errcode: 2)
061031 17:38:48 [ERROR] Failed to open log (file …

Version 1.1.1 of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, a robust and
intelligent solution for backup and recovery of MySQL databases is available
for download at Zmanda downloads page.

Changes since 1.1 release:
* FHS compliance (plugins are now in /usr/share/mysql-zrm directory)
* Bug fixes

ZRM for MySQL users manual is available in the wiki.

Please use bugzilla to report bugs in the release and product improvements.