The ability to restore MySQL logical backups is a significant part of disaster recovery procedures. It’s a last line of defense.
Even if you lost all data from a production server, physical backups (data files snapshot created with an offline copy or with Percona XtraBackup) could show the same internal database structure corruption as in production data. Backups in a simple plain text format allow you to avoid such corruptions and migrate between database formats (e.g., during a software upgrade and downgrade), or even help with migration from completely different database solution.
Unfortunately, the restore speed for logical backups is usually bad, and for a big database it could require days …
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