Monitoring MySQL backups is a vital part of any reliable backup solution. By monitoring the most common disaster recovery metrics, the Recovery Time Objective and the Recovery Point Objective, you can find out if a backup job was successful and produced a usable backup copy. The TwinDB Backup Tool along with Datadog allows monitoring both […]

The post Monitoring MySQL Backups With Datadog and TwinDB Backup Tool appeared first on TwinDB.

A week or two ago one of my former colleagues (at Percona) Jevin Real gave a talk titled Evolving Backups Strategy, Deploying pyxbackup at Percona Live 2015 in Amsterdam. I think Jervin raised some very good points about where MySQL backup solutions in general fall short. There are definitely a lot of tools and scripts out there that claim to do MySQL backups correctly, but don’t actually do it correctly. What I am more interested though is in measuring TwinDB against the points that Jervin highlighted to see if TwinDB falls short too.

Dependencies

We distribute TwinDB agent as a package that can be installed using the standard OS package management system. For example, using YUM on CentOS, RHEL and Amazon Linux, or using APT …

Incremental backups in MySQL were always a tricky exercise. Logical backup tools like mysqldump or mydumper don’t support incremental backups, although it’s possible to emulate them with binary logs. And with snapshot-based backup tools it’s close to impossible to take incremental copies.

Percona’s XtraBackup does support incremental backups, but you have to understand well how it works under the hood and be familiar with command line options. That’s not so easy and it’s getting worse when it comes to restoring the database from an incremental copy. Some shops even ditch incremental backups due to complexity in scripting backup and restore procedures.

With TwinDB incremental backups are easy. In this post I will show how to configure MySQL incremental backups for a replication …