I saw this in another posting....

"You can read to_lsn from xtrabackup_checkpoints and use its value as an argument to --incremental-lsn as described here: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/innobackupex/i ncremental_backups_innobackupex.html

Which is easier than recreating the directory structure and copying the entire file."

However this still results in a full backup to the remote host?

Full
#innobackupex --user=xtrabkp --password=***** --no-timestamp --remote-host=remotehost /MysqlBackup/current/base

Incr - when the lsn is derived from the to_lsn in the xtrabackup_checkpoints file in the base dir.
#innobackupex --user=xtrabkp --password=***** --remote-host=remotehost --incremental --incremental-lsn=226576624494 /MysqlBackup/current/

sorry forgot to put the version xtrabackup 1.6.3-292.lenny

Same problem here.

Is it even possible to use --remote-host together with --incremental?
Can't get it to work.

Has anyone figured this out? Seems like if a documented option isn't working then it's a bug or the documentation needs updating.

I've been able to perform a full backup followed by an incremental when creating a local backup on the MySQL server. To create the incremental backup I used the following.

xtrabackup --backup --incremental-lsn=8319504 --target-dir=/path/to/backupdir/incr

I've noticed that if using innobackupex command to create a local backup copy it puts the start lsn#:final lsn#. For instance If doing a full backup it would show 0:8319504 if starting at 0 and going to 8319504. I'm not even able to point xtrabackup or innobackupex at this xtrabackup_checkpoints file to perform an incremental backup. If I use xtrabackup it excludes the 0: or start lsn#":" from from the file.

File created by xtrabackup
backup_type = incremental
from_lsn = 8319504
to_lsn = 8319504
last_lsn = 8319504

File created by innobackupex.
backup_type = incremental
from_lsn = 0:8319504
to_lsn = 0:8319504
last_lsn = 0:8319504

The innobackupex command I've tried to use is as follows.

innobackupex --incremental --incremental-lsn=8319504 --stream=tar /path/to/tmpdir > somefile.tar

Which produces the above xtrabackup_checkpoint file and a full backup. If anyone has gotten this to work with innobackupex or knows how to do similar type command using xtrabackup sending the data to stdout, please do share.

It seems like this is not possible using the --stream=tar option and if the databases are myisam.

http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/innobackupex/i ncremental_backups_innobackupex.html

Warning

This procedure only affects XtraDB or InnoDB-based tables. Other tables with a different storage engine, e.g. MyISAM, will be copied entirely each time an incremental backup is performed.

So I guess for me incremental backups of my databases are not going to be possible. Also I've been told by Percona that there is a new bug in creating incremental backups using the --stream=tar option. This is documented to be fixed in the 1.9.1 (2.0 Beta) but it also doesn't work for me. Might be due to Warning above. Documented features/fixes in 1.9.1.

http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/release-notes/ 2.0/1.9.1.html