About Percona XtraBackup 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
Percona XtraBackup makes MySQL hot backups for all versions of Percona Server, MySQL, and MariaDB. It performs streaming, compressed, and incremental MySQL backups.
Percona XtraBackup works with MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona Server. 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 Percona XtraBackup. We recommend support for critical production deployments.
MySQL Backup Tool Feature Comparison¶
| Features | Percona XtraBackup | MySQL Enterprise backup |
|---|---|---|
| License | GPL | Proprietary |
| Price | Free | Included in subscription at $5000 per Server |
| Streaming and encryption formats | Open source | Proprietary |
| Supported MySQL flavors | MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB, Percona XtraDB Cluster, MariaDB Galera Cluster | MySQL |
| Supported operating systems | Linux | Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, FreeBSD. |
| Non-blocking InnoDB backups [1] | Yes | Yes |
| Blocking MyISAM backups | Yes | Yes |
| Incremental backups | Yes | Yes |
| Full compressed backups | Yes | Yes |
| Incremental compressed backups | Yes | |
| Fast incremental backups [2] | Yes | |
| Incremental backups with archived logs feature in Percona Server | Yes | |
| Incremental backups with REDO log only | Yes | |
| Backup locks [8] | Yes | |
| Encrypted backups | Yes | Yes [3] |
| Streaming backups | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel local backups | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel compression | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel encryption | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel apply-log | Yes | |
| Parallel copy-back | Yes | |
| Partial backups | Yes | Yes |
| Partial backups of individual partitions | Yes | |
| Throttling [4] | Yes | Yes |
| Backup image validation | Yes | |
| Point-in-time recovery support | Yes | Yes |
| Safe slave backups | Yes | |
| Compact backups [5] | Yes | |
| Buffer pool state backups | Yes | |
| Individual tables export | Yes | Yes [6] |
| Individual partitions export | Yes | |
| Restoring tables to a different server [7] | Yes | Yes |
| Data & index file statistics | Yes | |
| InnoDB secondary indexes defragmentation | Yes | |
rsync support to minimize lock time |
Yes | |
Improved FTWRL handling |
Yes | |
| Backup history table | Yes | Yes |
| Backup progress table | Yes | |
| Offline backups | Yes | |
| Backup to tape media managers | Yes | |
| Cloud backups support | Amazon S3 | |
| External graphical user interfaces to backup/recovery | Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL | MySQL Workbench, MySQL Enterprise Monitor |
What are the features of Percona XtraBackup?¶
Here is a short list of Percona 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] | InnoDB tables are still locked while copying non-InnoDB data. |
| [2] | Fast incremental backups are supported for Percona Server with XtraDB changed page tracking enabled. |
| [3] | Percona XtraBackup supports encryption with any kinds of backups. MySQL Enterprise Backup only supports encryption for single-file backups. |
| [4] | Percona XtraBackup performs throttling based on the number of IO operations per second. MySQL Enterprise Backup supports a configurable sleep time between operations. |
| [5] | Percona XtraBackup skips secondary index pages and recreates them when a compact backup is prepared. MySQL Enterprise Backup skips unused pages and reinserts on the prepare stage. |
| [6] | Percona XtraBackup can export individual tables even from a full backup, regardless of the InnoDB version. MySQL Enterprise Backup uses InnoDB 5.6 transportable tablespaces only when performing a partial backup. |
| [7] | Tables exported with Percona XtraBackup can be imported into Percona Server 5.1, 5.5 or 5.6+, or MySQL 5.6+. Transportable tablespaces created with MySQL Enterprise Backup can only be imported to Percona Server 5.6+, MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.0+. |
| [8] | Backup locks is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ
LOCK available in Percona Server 5.6+. Percona XtraBackup uses
them automatically to copy non-InnoDB data to avoid blocking DML
queries that modify InnoDB tables. |
