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Create a full backup

To create a backup, run xtrabackup with the --backup option. You also must specify the --target-dir option, which is where the backup is stored. If the InnoDB data or log files are not stored in the same directory, you must specify their location. If the target directory does not exist, xtrabackup creates it. If the directory does exist and is empty, xtrabackup succeeds.

xtrabackup does not overwrite existing files. It will fail with operating system error 17, file exists.

The following command starts the process:

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

This operation stores the backup at /data/backups/. If you specify a relative path, the target directory is relative to the current directory.

During the backup process, the output shows the copied data files, and a log file thread that scans and copies from the log files.

The following is an example of the output:

Expected output
160906 10:19:17 Finished backing up non-InnoDB tables and files
160906 10:19:17 Executing FLUSH NO_WRITE_TO_BINLOG ENGINE LOGS...
xtrabackup: The latest check point (for incremental): '62988944'
xtrabackup: Stopping log copying thread.
.160906 10:19:18 >> log scanned up to (137343534)
160906 10:19:18 Executing UNLOCK TABLES
160906 10:19:18 All tables unlocked
160906 10:19:18 Backup created in directory '/data/backups/'
160906 10:19:18 [00] Writing backup-my.cnf
160906 10:19:18 [00]        ...done
160906 10:19:18 [00] Writing xtrabackup_info
160906 10:19:18 [00]        ...done
xtrabackup: Transaction log of lsn (26970807) to (137343534) was copied.
160906 10:19:18 completed OK!

The process ends with the following statement; the value of the <LSN> depends on your system:

$ xtrabackup: Transaction log of lsn (<LSN>) to (<LSN>) was copied.

Note

Log copying thread checks the transactional log every second to see if there were any new log records written that need to be copied, but there is a chance that the log copying thread might not be able to keep up with the amount of writes that go to the transactional logs, and will hit an error when the log records are overwritten before they could be read.

After the backup is finished, the target directory will contain files such as the following, assuming you have a single InnoDB table test.tbl1 and you are using MySQL’s innodb_file_per_table option:

$ ls -lh /data/backups/

The result should look like this:

Expected output
total 182M
drwx------  7 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 .
drwxrwxrwt 11 root root 4.0K Sep  6 11:05 ..
-rw-r-----  1 root root  387 Sep  6 10:19 backup-my.cnf
-rw-r-----  1 root root  76M Sep  6 10:19 ibdata1
drwx------  2 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 mysql
drwx------  2 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 performance_schema
drwx------  2 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 sbtest
drwx------  2 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 test
drwx------  2 root root 4.0K Sep  6 10:19 world2
-rw-r-----  1 root root  116 Sep  6 10:19 xtrabackup_checkpoints
-rw-r-----  1 root root  433 Sep  6 10:19 xtrabackup_info
-rw-r-----  1 root root 106M Sep  6 10:19 xtrabackup_logfile

The backup can take a long time, depending on how large the database is. It is safe to cancel at any time, because xtrabackup does not modify the database.

Next step

Prepare the backup

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