Failing @ Percona

MySQL & MariaDB Percona XtraBackup
1

Good afternoon,

I’m fairly new to using Percona’s XtraBackup. Our databases have grown to a size where mysqldump is taking up to 12 hours to backup an entire server, and causes locking issues. This obviously is no longer acceptable.

What I like about mysqldump is that I can directly backup and restore individual db’s. My understanding (from a face to face conversation with the CEO of Percona) is that XtraBackup is not so easy in this aspect. There was some talk about doing a backup and then restoring the data elsewhere and copying back only what we need. I’m having a heck of a time finding good documentation for entry level Percona skills.

I feel as though the Percona instructions (PDF) were written for someone with years of experience and I am spending a lot of time doing trial and error on a test VM.

Here is what I would like to do:

  1. Backup all the databases on a server, and if something becomes corrupt, I want to be able to restore a single database or a table, etc. I’m not a fan of having to restore the entire thing when only portions are needed. Does this make sense? Thus far the copy-back seems to require EVERYTHING.

  2. I would like to be able to exclude a database in my backup. We have a tmp db that is constantly changing as temp data and tables are written. This causes a failure on the full backup because XtraBackup will attempt to write files it has already written - I’m guessing because the tables were deleted and recreated during the backup process. I get an error like:

xtrabackup_56: Can’t create/write to file ‘/media/Synology/2015-05-06_14-36-47/tmp/wrk_ReportStores_StoreList.ibd.pmap’ (Errcode: 17 - File exists)
innobackupex: Error: The xtrabackup child process has died at /usr/bin/innobackupex line 2622.

If I scroll up in the SSH screen I see the file was created maybe 5 minutes earlier.

EXAMPLE:

[01] Copying ./tmp/wrk_reportstores_storelist.ibd to /media/Synology/2015-05-06_14-36-47/tmp/wrk_reportstores_storelist.ibd
[01] …done

This aborts the backup all together. Is there an exclude option?

  1. The apply-log switch… do you do that AFTER you create the backup of BEFORE you do a restore? I want to make sure we aren’t writing to the production DB. I thought it was taking the log it captured and applying it to the backup files, but I want to be sure.

Here is the command I am running for the full backup:

sudo innobackupex --user=backupuser --password=backuppassword --compact /media/Synology/

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :slight_smile:

2

Let me try to answer but others may have a better suggestion, so here goes:

1] You can run “–apply-log --export” during the prepare phase so as to create those .exp and .cfg files needed when importing the individual tables. You can read further here - [url]Percona XtraBackup. This is going to be a tedious task in case you plan on importing a lot of tables.

2] There is no exclude option but i think you may be able to use either --databases or --tables-file options, of course you should not include the database you want NOT to be backed up in the process. For further reading - [url]Percona XtraBackup

3] There is no specific rule on whether you run --apply-log after the backup was created or before you want the backup restored. BUT, to make sure that your backup is valid, you can run --apply-log to check it. To understand what --apply-log does, please refer to [url]Percona XtraBackup, since --apply-log implies running xtrabackup --prepare twice.

3

Thanks for getting back to me jrivera.

Let’s say I have a server with 4 databases, 3 of them I want backed up. The database names are com, edw, trx, and tmp. I do not want tmp to be backed up. What would be the easiest way to do this? Let’s assume that each of the ones I want to backup has more than 100 tables, so listing the tables individually would be an epic waste of time.

I’m looking for simplicity where possible. Appreciate any assistance.

4

Get the list of schema.tables first and write it to a file:
mysql -uroot -p -Ne “select concat(table_schema,‘.’,table_name) from information_schema.tables where table_schema not in (‘mysql’,‘information_schema’,‘performance_schema’,‘tmp’)” > filtered.txt

then run innobackupex --tables-file=/path/to/filtered.txt [other options here]

see if this works!