We use innoback(ex) wrapped in our own scripts to allow for rotation and other operations. We also use ZRM for some installations, so this would apply to integration with this tool as well. These are the glitches I found:

1. Using streaming by piping it into ‘gzip’ masks the return code from innobackupex.pl. Since gzip will almost always return 0, you can’t rely on it to determine backup success.

2. The next alternative would be to review the innobackupex.pl’s output for the OK at the end. But since it redirects the output to ’stderr’ to allow for streaming, you need to add “2> innobackupex.log” before piping and grep for the “OK” at the end.

3. As Sheeri pointed out, the need to run it as user ‘mysql’ seems to come from the fact that it requires ‘write’ privileges for at least some of the ‘ibdata*’ files. I don’t feel quite comfortable with this requirement since it’s not necessary for ‘innobackup.pl’

My $.02
Gerry

http://www.percona.com/mysql/xtrabackup/0.7/
http://www.percona.com/mysql/xtrabackup/xtrabackup-0.7.tar.gz

So the issue is the wiki points to the old version 0.3
http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:howtogetbin

I have updated the wiki.

* innobackupex script is limited in the type of options you can specify compared to what the xtrabackup executable supports. I find this annoying since it limits the directories where you can have the backups, data directories and logs. I’m exploring the possibility of creating a ZRM pluging that should get rid of these limitations.

* Xtrabackup doesn’t work for MySQL v4.1. In the Percona forums there was a suggestion that the 5.0 patch should work. This is true, but xtrabackup.c has other dependencies on 5.x definitions and structures I didn’t have time to review. Baron Schwartz correctly suggested that these dependencies might be trivial in a tweet directed to myself. I’ll post my findings to the Percona forums and hopefully we can soon have a patched version.

To get around this I successfully built the rc-0.7 from the source, following the instructions on the xtrabackup website. The main issues with building was building MySQL from the source (not xtrabackup).

Evgeniy, Yasufumi et al, please bite the bullet and release official binaries for rc-0.7

This is bleeding edge software. If you are going to use it in a production environment you need to fully aware that bugs will exist.

Have Fun

Paul

I think it’s worthwhile mentioning that Xtrabackup allows for streaming: you can pipe the backup into | tar, | ssh, what have you.
I think this must be one of its simple yet big advantages. ibbackup requires enough local or nfs mounted disk space, while xtrabackup allows for easy network backup. (with ibbackup it’s even worse when restoring from backup: it actually requires the backup and restored files to be on the same directory).

Cheers

#> innobackupex –user=foo –password=bar –stream=tar ./ | gzip – > /path/to/backup.tar.gz

I haven’t tested it extensively, but it worked for me.