# Backup workflow and restoring single tables **URL:** \ **Category:** Percona XtraBackup\ **Created:** [October 13, 2014, 4:22pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/backup-workflow-and-restoring-single-tables/3817 "2014-10-13T16:22:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![noodlesnz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@noodlesnz](https://forums.percona.com/u/noodlesnz)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2014, 4:22pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/backup-workflow-and-restoring-single-tables/3817/1 "2014-10-13T16:22:47Z")
I’ve just started playing with innobackupex as a replacement for mysqldump. I’m just trying to work out how to best use compression/xbstream in my backups. If I run innobackupex and then do an --apply-log when do I use --compress and/or xbstream? I’m trying to work out a way that I could restore a single table from a backup without having to download the whole backup file (which is 30GB+ uncompressed) Is it possible to extract a single table/database from xbstream or is it just easier to not use xbstream and backup all the individual table files instead? ---
**Author:** ![mirfan](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/mirfan/32/16890_2.png) [@mirfan](https://forums.percona.com/u/mirfan)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2014, 1:34am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/backup-workflow-and-restoring-single-tables/3817/2 "2014-10-14T01:34:17Z")
xbstream + compress will encrypt and it speeds up your backup process. You can unpack the xbstream + compress backup and restore individual tables too. You can check for details with the process and examples in documentation here [url][Percona XtraBackup](http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.2/innobackupex/streaming_backups_innobackupex.html%5B/url%5D) and [url][Percona XtraBackup](http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.2/innobackupex/restoring_individual_tables_ibk.html%5B/url%5D)