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Percona XtraBackup

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“Facebook users create a vast amount of data every day. To make sure that data is stored reliably, we back up our databases daily. Facebook was an early adopter of incremental backup in XtraBackup.”   —Vamsi Ponnekanti, Facebook Engineering

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

MySQL Backup Tool Feature Comparison

FeaturePercona XtraBackupMySQL Enterprise Backup
(InnoDB Hot Backup)
LicenseGPLProprietary
PriceFree$5000 per server
Open sourceYes
Non-blockingYesYes
InnoDB backupsYesYes
MyISAM backups 1YesYes
Compressed backupsYesYes
Partial backupsYesYes
Throttling 2YesYes
Point-in-time recovery supportYesYes
Incremental backupsYesYes
Streaming backupsYesYes
Parallel backups 3Yes
OS buffer optimizations 4Yes
Export individual tablesYes
Restore tables to a different serverYes
Analyze data & index filesYes
Familiar command-line behavior 5Yes

The above comparison is based on XtraBackup version 1.4 and MySQL Enterprise Backup version 3.5 on December 7, 2010. Notes:

  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 can copy files in parallel as of version 1.5, currently in Beta.
  4. XtraBackup tunes the operating system buffers to avoid swapping. See the documentation.
  5. 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.

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 online
  • Create new MySQL replication slaves easily
  • Backup MySQL without adding load to the server
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