About Percona Xtrabackup

Percona XtraBackup is the world’s only open-source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. With Percona XtraBackup, you can achieve the following benefits:

• Backups that complete quickly and reliably
• Uninterrupted transaction processing during backups
• Savings on disk space and network bandwidth
• Automatic backup verification
• Higher uptime due to faster restore time

XtraBackup makes MySQL hot backups for all versions of Percona Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and Drizzle. It performs streaming, compressed, and incremental MySQL backups.

Percona XtraBackup works with MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, and Drizzle databases (support for Drizzle is beta). It supports completely non-blocking backups of InnoDB, XtraDB, and HailDB storage engines. In addition, it can back up the following storage engines by briefly pausing writes at the end of the backup: MyISAM, Merge, and Archive, including partitioned tables, triggers, and database options.

Percona’s enterprise-grade commercial MySQL Support contracts include support for XtraBackup. We recommend support for critical production deployments.

MySQL Backup Tool Feature Comparison

Features	Percona XtraBackup	MySQL Enterprise Backup (InnoDB Hot Backup)
License	GPL	Proprietary
Price	Free	$5000 per server
Open source	Yes
Non-blocking [1]	Yes	Yes
InnoDB backups	Yes	Yes
MyISAM backups	Yes	Yes
Compressed backups	Yes	Yes
Partial backups	Yes	Yes
Throttling [2]	Yes	Yes
Point-in-time recovery support	Yes	Yes
Incremental backups	Yes	Yes
Parallel backups	Yes
Streaming backups	Yes
Compact backups	Yes
Encrypted backups	Yes
Parallel compression	Yes
LRU backups	Yes
OS buffer optimizations [3]	Yes
Export individual tables	Yes
Restore tables to a different server	Yes
Analyze data & index files	Yes
Familiar command-line behavior [4]	Yes

What are the features of Percona XtraBackup?

Here is a short list of XtraBackup features. See the documentation for more.

• Create hot InnoDB backups without pausing your database
• Make incremental backups of MySQL
• Stream compressed MySQL backups to another server
• Move tables between MySQL servers on-line
• Create new MySQL replication slaves easily
• Backup MySQL without adding load to the server

Footnotes

[1]	MyISAM backups require a table lock.

[2]	XtraBackup performs throttling based on the number of IO operations per second. MySQL Enterprise Backup supports a configurable sleep time between operations.

[3]	XtraBackup tunes the operating system buffers to avoid swapping. See the documentation.

[4]	XtraBackup is linked against the MySQL client libraries, so it behaves the same as standard MySQL command-line programs. MySQL Enterprise Backup has its own command-line and configuration-file behaviors.