Percona XtraBackup is an open source, portable, free and non-blocking command-line software that acts as a standalone backup solution for the well-known XtraDB and InnoDB storage engines. It features automatic backup verification and offers higher uptimes than other similar products.
The program is fully compatible with both MySQL and MariaDB database servers, and it is heavily used by the popular Facebook social networking service for incremental backups. It’s designed to solve real-world problems when backing up very large, heavily loaded databases.
Features at a glance
Key features include the ability to perform backups online while avoiding interrupting your database, the ability to perform streaming backups to another server, as well as the ability to perform incremental backups while saving money on disk space and network bandwidth.
With Percona XtraBackup your backups will complete reliably and quickly. You can also create new replication slaves easily, perform advanced analysis of data and index files, and move individual tables between servers without restarting, a task that requires XtraDB for import.
The software supports various MySQL flavors, among which we can mention MySQL, MariaDB, MariaDB Galera Cluster, Percona Server and Percona XtraDB Cluster. It also supports all GNU/Linux operating systems, running well on 32-bit and 64-bit hardware.
Among other features, we can mention blocking MyISAM backups, full compressed backups, incremental compressed backups, fast incremental backups, incremental backups with archived logs and REDO log only, parallel local backups, copy-back, apply-log, compression and encryption.
Furthermore, is also comes with rsync support for state-of-the-art file synchronization, individual tables export, enhanced FTWRL handling, compact backups, point-in-time recovery support, offline backups, as well as support for cloud backups.
Under the hood and availability
Percona XtraBackup is written in the C, C++ and Perl programming languages. It’s a command-line software, distributed as pre-built binary packages for Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions, as well as universal binary and source archives.
