Limitations of xtrabackup

The xtrabackup binary has some limitations you should be aware of to ensure that your backups go smoothly and are recoverable.

• If the xtrabackup_logfile is larger than 4GB, the --prepare step will fail on 32-bit versions of xtrabackup. This limitation also applied to some older 64-bit versions of xtrabackup ( what versions?).
• xtrabackup does not currently create new InnoDB log files (ib_logfile0, etc) during the initial --prepare step. You must prepare the backup a second time to do this, if you wish.
• xtrabackup copies only the InnoDB data and logs. It does not copy table definition files (.frm files), MyISAM data, users, privileges, or any other portions of the overall database that lie outside of the InnoDB data. To back up this data, you need a wrapper script such as innobackupex.
• xtrabackup doesn't understand the very old --set-variable my.cnf syntax that MySQL uses. See configuration.