What are odds MySQL table can be recovered?

This is the most asked question. Every single customer asks if their MySQL table can be recovered. Although it’s not possible to answer that with 100% confidence there are ways to estimate recovery chances. I will describe few tricks.

Generally speaking, if data is on media there are high odds TwinDB data recovery toolkit can fetch it. Where to look for depends on accident type.

Online MySQL data recovery toolkit

On our Data Recovery portal you can upload an .ibd file and check if the InnoDB tablespace contains any good records. The table space may be corrupt. The tool should handle that.

DROP TABLE or DATABASE with innodb_file_per_table=OFF

If …

ibdconnect is a tool to connect an ibd file to a foreign ibdata file. it’s important to understand how it works as secondary keys may cause interesting behavior.

Here is a table with a unique secondary key:

CREATE TABLE `t1` (
`id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`value` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `uni_value` (`value`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

When I update InnoDB dictionary with ibdconnect it all goes well:

# ./ibdconnect -f  t1.idb -o  /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1 -d test -t t1

…

Updating test/t1 (table_id 13) with id 0xA3060000
SYS_TABLES is updated successfully
…

SYS_INDEXES is updated successfully
ibdconnect modifies content of ibdata1, so checksums are wrong now. innochecksum_changer from …