Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Oct 1, 2009
Firstly, I have to thank my co-workers Singer Wang and Gerry Narvaja for doing a lot of the work that resulted in this comparison.
After running both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, we have found that there is a measurable but not large difference between the resources that Xtrabackup and InnoDB Hot Backup consume.
Xtrabackup:
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jun 9, 2009
As Baron points out, Percona’s Xtrabackup tool can be used just like InnoDB Hot Backup.
Many are wondering, “is it good enough?” In fact, I wondered the same thing, and after a few weeks of using and testing Xtrabackup (on machines that have MyISAM and InnoDB tables), I can say:
0) We have not run into any problems with backing up InnoDB tables; on the machines we’ve run it on (RHEL 5.3 and Debian) it has been stable.
1) We were able to use one of the binaries provided by Percona — we did not have to compile anything. Binaries are provided for 64-bit versions of Linux
2) Innobackupex is the script analogous to Innobackup. Basically, this is a wrapper script for Xtrabackup that will copy the non-InnoDB tables.
3) Usually we run InnoDB Hot Backup from a non-privileged user. We had to run Xtrabackup as the mysql user; we think this is because it writes a state file in the datadir, but we did not dig too hard — once we saw that running it from the mysql user worked, we just left it like that.
4) Xtrabackup does not have a –compress option like InnoDB hot backup does. Having the option would be useful, but I believe this option will come soon.
Currently, for clients who want a hot backup solution but do not want to pay for InnoDB Hot Backup, Pythian recommends Xtrabackup.
