Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 introduces a new “log archiving” feature. Percona XtraBackup 2.1.5 supports “apply archived logs.” What does it mean and how it can be used?

Percona products propose three kinds of incremental backups. The first is full scan of data files and comparison the data with backup data to find some delta. This approach provides a history of changes and saves disk space by storing only data deltas. But the disadvantage is a full-data file scan that adds load to the disk subsystem. The second kind of incremental backup avoids extra disk load during data file scans.

The idea is in reading only changed data pages. The information about what specific pages were changed is provided by the server itself which …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 has introduced a new feature called Log Archiving for XtraDB. This feature makes copies of the old log files before they are overwritten, thus saving all the redo log for a write workload.

When log archiving is enabled, it duplicates all redo log writes in a separate set of files in addition to normal redo log writing, creating new files as necessary.

Archived log file name format is ib_log_archive_startlsn. The start LSN marks the log sequence number when the archive was started. An example of the archived log files should look like this:

ib_log_archive_00000000010145937920
ib_log_archive_00000000010196267520

In order to …