# Incremental backup after tar'd full backup?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backup-after-tard-full-backup/2267>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [July 17, 2012, 1:30am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backup-after-tard-full-backup/2267 "2012-07-17T01:30:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![EphemeralAttention](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f0a364/32.png) [@EphemeralAttention](https://forums.percona.com/u/EphemeralAttention)\
**Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 1:30am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backup-after-tard-full-backup/2267/1 "2012-07-17T01:30:31Z")

</div>

Hi

I am currently running nightly full backups with innobackupex using --stream=tar output, piping it through to openssl to encrypt using aes-256-cbc and redirecting output to backup-`data`.tar.encrypted

This has been working perfectly and after decrypting the backup, I can restore the database properly.

Now I want to implement incremental backups. I have managed to do this in a test environment without using tar stream or encryption, but I can’t figure out how to add it to this setup I have built.

Is there a way I can get the xtrabackup\_checkpoints file out before the tar archive → openssl compression?

Is there a way I can get the lsn value out of this? (I’m happy to write a script which generates a checkpoints file containing the lsn.

Help would be appreciated please 🙂

Software and versions  
CentOS 5.4 x86\_64  
xtrabackup\_55 version 1.6.4  
InnoDB Backup Utility v1.5.1-xtrabackup  
Mysql 5.5

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dannycolumbus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@dannycolumbus](https://forums.percona.com/u/dannycolumbus)\
**Post date:** [September 7, 2012, 12:57pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backup-after-tard-full-backup/2267/2 "2012-09-07T12:57:29Z")

</div>

Unfortunately, streaming incrementals using tar isn’t documented. At [http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/innobackupex/i](http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/innobackupex/i) ncremental\_backups\_innobackupex.html, there’s a heading for “Incremental Streaming Backups using xbstream and tar”, but only informaton on how to use xbstream. I 'd assume this is because streaming incrementals using tar is either not recommended or supported, or maybe it’s just an oversight and needs to be revised.