# Howto backup only innodb files (no myisam stuff) with 2.3.2?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/howto-backup-only-innodb-files-no-myisam-stuff-with-2-3-2/4499>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [November 6, 2015, 9:18am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/howto-backup-only-innodb-files-no-myisam-stuff-with-2-3-2/4499 "2015-11-06T09:18:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Steiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e99b99/32.png) [@Frank\_Steiner](https://forums.percona.com/u/Frank_Steiner)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 9:18am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/howto-backup-only-innodb-files-no-myisam-stuff-with-2-3-2/4499/1 "2015-11-06T09:18:53Z")

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Hi,  
incremental backups with xtrabackup 2.3.2 is somewhat useless for a database with 400GB of myisam tables and 50 GB of innodb tables, because in every incremental backup the 400 GB myisam stuff is copied again (now that xtrabackup includes myisam files and obsoletes innobackupex).

How can we revert the old behaviour and update innodb files only, completely ignoring all myisam tables?

Btw, to make incremental backup really usable with large myisam tables, it shouldn’t be too hard to use rsync on the myisam files together with “–link-dest=…/full/” to create a directory for the incremental backup that contains only the changed files and symlinks the others. The merge process could then just move the real files (that are not links) from the inc/ dir over the ones in the full/ dir.  
Then an incremental backup would really be incremental for both, innodb and myisam tables.

cu,  
Frank

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**Author:** ![scott.nemes](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/scott.nemes/32/5_2.png) [@scott.nemes](https://forums.percona.com/u/scott.nemes)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 10:24am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/howto-backup-only-innodb-files-no-myisam-stuff-with-2-3-2/4499/2 "2015-11-06T10:24:49Z")

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Hi Frank;

You will likely just need to specify the InnoDB tables explicitly (partial backup). Not ideal, but I do not know of any other way to split it up unless you were to put all InnoDB tables into a separate database.

[url][Percona XtraBackup](https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.3/xtrabackup_bin/partial_backups.html%5B/url%5D)

-Scott

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Steiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e99b99/32.png) [@Frank\_Steiner](https://forums.percona.com/u/Frank_Steiner)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2015, 6:58am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/howto-backup-only-innodb-files-no-myisam-stuff-with-2-3-2/4499/3 "2015-11-09T06:58:37Z")

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Thanks, Scott, I will try this! Maybe you could consider this as an option for the next release, sth. like “–innodb-only” to ignore all myisam stuff.  
cu,  
Frank