MySQL Enterprise Backup Team is pleased to announce major improvements in incremental backup performance starting with release 4.1.

Introduction

The current incremental backup algorithm scans all the tables to gather changed pages even if very few tables are modified since the previous backup and thus results in a 'full-scan' incremental backup. This may result in increment backups requiring the same amount of time as full backup because it scans all the tables. The new algorithm aims to eliminate this extra time.

The new algorithm scans only those tables that have been modified since the previous backup. This algorithm relies on modification time, which is similar to an earlier improvement made for full backup. That full backup algorithm is known as optimistic full backup, hence new improvement is named …

September 25, 2014 By Severalnines

Coming up with a backup strategy that does not affect database performance or lock your tables can be tricky. How do you backup your production database cluster without affecting your applications? Should you use mysqldump or Percona Xtrabackup? When should you use incremental backups? Where do you store the backups? In this blog post, we will cover some of the common backup methods for Galera Cluster for MySQL/MariaDB, and how you can get the most out of these. 

Backup Method

There are various ways to backup your Galera Cluster data:

• xtrabackup (full physical backup)
• xtrabackup (incremental physical backup)
• mysqldump (logical backup)
• binary logging 
• replication slave

Xtrabackup (full backup)

Xtrabackup is an open-source MySQL hot …

Introduction

In MySQL Enterprise Backup v3.7.0 (MEB 3.7.0) a new option '–incremental-base' was introduced. Using this option a user can take in incremental backup without specifying the '–start-lsn' option. Description of this option can be found here. Instead of '–start-lsn' the user can provide the location …

The latest release of MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB 3.7.0) introduces a new method for performing incremental hot backups - the redo-log-only incremental backup. This new method of incremental backups allows for highly compact and fast incremental backups and MEB users now have the choice between data-file based incremental backups and the redo-log-only incremental backups.

In data-file based incremental backups (performed using the '--incremental' option) MEB scans all InnoDB datafiles but copies to the backup only modified pages. The main benefit of this is …

The latest release of MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB 3.7.0) introduces a new method for performing incremental hot backups - the redo-log-only incremental backup. This new method of incremental backups allows for highly compact and fast incremental backups and MEB users now have the choice between data-file based incremental backups and the redo-log-only incremental backups.

In data-file based incremental backups (performed using the '--incremental' option) MEB scans all InnoDB datafiles but copies to the backup only modified pages. The main benefit of this is …

In its latest release MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB 3.7.0) rolled out a new feature called 'incremental-base' which can save a lot of time and effort of the users when taking incremental backups. Let us understand this new feature and how it can be helpful:

• What is an incremental backup ?
• Taking incremental backup prior to MEB 3.7.0
• Taking …

In its latest release MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB 3.7.0) rolled out a new feature called 'incremental-base' which can save a lot of time and effort of the users when taking incremental backups. Let us understand this new feature and how it can be helpful:

• What is an incremental backup ?
• Taking incremental backup prior to MEB 3.7.0
• Taking …

We wanted to optimize and test backups for one of our new large scale setup before we could finalize on the backup plan. Our challenge was the data volume was almost 30x more than our normal volumes. Since this involved large volume of data we thought this might be a good candidate to test incremental backups. We wrote a wrapper script to save the states between full backups and incremental backups and did some tests with smaller data sets. It worked perfectly fine. The version of xtrabackup we were testing was 1.6.2.

The incremental backups were completing well within 30minutes. We set out to test what would happen if the amount of incremental diff was large. While doing this test, we started getting backup failures with the following error

20110726_225312.log-110727 00:56:10 innobackupex: Starting to backup .frm, .MRG, .MYD, .MYI,
20110726_225312.log-innobackupex: …