MariaDB Backup Overview

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MariaDB Backup as part of MariaDB 10.1.25 / MariaDB 10.2.7 is of Beta maturity.

About MariaDB Backup

MariaDB Backup is an open source tool provided by MariaDB for performing physical online backups of InnoDB, Aria and MyISAM tables. For InnoDB, “hot online” backups are possible. MariaDB Backup is provided as part of MariaDB Server starting with MariaDB 10.1.23. The tool is available on Linux and Windows.

MariaDB Server 10.1 introduced MariaDB Compression and Data-at-Rest Encryption. For both we have seen high interest from the users of MariaDB Server. However, existing backup solutions from our ecosystem did not support full backup capability for these features.

To address our customers and community users concerns, we decided to provide a backup solution that would support full backup capability for MariaDB Server that includes encrypted and compressed data. The most obvious way to do this was to create a solution based on the well known and used backup tool Percona XtraBackup. We extended it and named our solution MariaDB Backup.

MariaDB Backup releases

You will not find MariaDB Backup as a separate downloadable product at this time. MariaDB Backup will be provided as a separate package included in new releases of MariaDB Server 10.1 and MariaDB Server 10.2.

MariaDB Backup is tightly connected to the storage engines XtraDB/InnoDB, and maintaining MariaDB Backup as part of the Server enables us to test it against changes in the Server and storage engines.

Installing on Linux

MariaDB Backup is a separate package in our repositories. On Debian and Ubuntu it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install mariadb-backup-10.1

On CentOS, and RHEL it can be installed with:

sudo yum install MariaDB-backup

On Fedora and SLES/OpenSUSE it can be installed by replacing yum in the example above with dnf and zypper, resepectively.

Installing on Windows

To install on Windows, select Backup utilities:

mariadb_backup_windows

Using MariaDB Backup

MariaDB Backup is currently based on Percona XtraBackup 2.3.8 and therefore provides similar functionality plus:

  • Backup/Restore of Data-at-Rest encrypted XtraDB/InnoDB tables.
  • Backup/Restore when MariaDB Compression is used for table types XtraDB/InnoDB.
  • Backup/Restore of Data-at-Rest encrypted Aria tables.
  • Using MariaDB Backup for a SST with Galera Cluster, when Data-at-Rest encryption is used.
  • Support of Microsoft Windows.

The command to use MariaDB Backup is

mariabackup <params>

To use MariaDB Backup for Galera Cluster SST, the script wsrep_sst_mariabackup.sh is provided and the Galera configuration setting is used:

wsrep_sst_method = mariabackup

Maturity and XtraBackup version

MariaDB Backup/Server VersionMaturityPercona XtraBackup Version
MariaDB 10.1.26GA2.3.8
MariaDB 10.2.7, MariaDB 10.1.25Beta2.3.8
MariaDB 10.1.23Alpha2.3.8

Limitations

MariaDB 10.2.7

MariaDB Backup in 10.2.7 does not support --export functionality. This is planned for the next release. In this version you can workaround this limitation by preparing the backup as usual (without the --export flag), then start the server and execute FLUSH TABLES FOR EXPORT.

Note that mariabackup 10.2.7 doesn't create empty log files and relies on the --copy-back action executed by user (which deletes old innodb log files, if any).

For situations where users don't use --copy-back or make sure that the data directory is empty before restoring, backups created with mariabackup 10.2.7 may well become inconsistent/corrupted (because of the presence of leftover InnoDB logs).

Limitations compared to Percona XtraBackup:

  • Backup tool based encryption (gcrypt) is not supported.
  • No symlink to innobackupex - use the “--innobackupex” parameter instead.
  • "--compact" and "--rebuild_indexes" are not supported
  • Support for --stream=tar was removed in 10.1.24

More info

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