Narayan Newton

So, long ago in a galaxy far far away there was a table engine called InnoDB. It was transactional, it was fast...it was briefly not owned by Oracle. Life was pretty awesome. However....backup sucked. Big time.... To do a consistent point in time backup, we needed to do a single transactional dump of the entire database. This means that we need to hold a short-lived lock at the beginning of the dump (which can be problematic) and that it takes _forever_ to dump and restore.

There was another solution....sort of. There is a tool called InnoDBHotBackup which can do a full backup at close to device speed. It can also cost all arms and all legs. There was really no other solution for high speed InnoDB backup though. Until now.

The good people at Percona have coded something quite fantastic, an open source replacement for InnoDBHotBackup. It is very young at this point, but the design is sound and it seems to work quite well. It works in a very similar way to InnoDBHotBackup, by copying out the ibdata file while tracking the InnoDB log files. It then can apply the log changes on the data file after the copy is complete. This is very cool stuff.

URL: http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:start