Create a compressed backup

Percona XtraBackup supports compressed backups. To make a compressed backup, use the --compress option along with the --backup and --target-dir options. A local or streaming backup can be compressed or decompressed with xbstream.

By default, the --compress option uses the zstandard tool that you can install with the percona-release package configuration tool as follows:

$ sudo percona-release enable tools
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install zstandard

Note

Enable the repository: percona-release enable-only tools release.

If Percona XtraBackup is intended to be used in combination with the upstream MySQL Server, you only need to enable the tools repository: percona-release enable-only tools.

Percona XtraBackup supports the following compression algorithms:

Zstandard (ZSTD)

The Zstandard (ZSTD) is a fast lossless compression algorithm that targets real-time compression scenarios and better compression ratios. ZSTD is the default compression algorithm for the --compress option.

To compress files using the ZSTD compression algorithm, use the --compress option:

$ xtrabackup --backup --compress --target-dir=/data/backup

The resulting files have the \*.zst format.

You can specify ZSTD compression level with the --compress-zstd-level(=#) option. The default value is 1.

$ xtrabackup –backup –compress –compress-zstd-level=1 –target-dir=/data/backup

lz4

To compress files using the lz4 compression algorithm, set the --compress option to lz4:

$ xtrabackup --backup --compress=lz4 --target-dir=/data/backup

The resulting files have the \*.lz4 format.

If you want to speed up the compression you can use the parallel compression, which can be enabled with --compress-threads option. Following example will use four threads for compression:

$ xtrabackup --backup --compress --compress-threads=4 \
--target-dir=/data/compressed/

Expected output

...
170223 13:00:38 [01] Compressing ./test/sbtest1.frm to /tmp/compressed/test/sbtest1.frm.qp
170223 13:00:38 [01]        ...done
170223 13:00:38 [01] Compressing ./test/sbtest2.frm to /tmp/compressed/test/sbtest2.frm.qp
170223 13:00:38 [01]        ...done
...
170223 13:00:39 [00] Compressing xtrabackup_info
170223 13:00:39 [00]        ...done
xtrabackup: Transaction log of lsn (9291934) to (9291934) was copied.
170223 13:00:39 completed OK!

Next step

Prepare the backup

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