# Incremental Backups - Do I need to use innobackupex for the full backup and each increment?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backups-do-i-need-to-use-innobackupex-for-the-full-backup-and-each-increment/2165>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [August 31, 2011, 9:42am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backups-do-i-need-to-use-innobackupex-for-the-full-backup-and-each-increment/2165 "2011-08-31T09:42:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![heavydawson](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/heavydawson/32/855_2.png) [@heavydawson](https://forums.percona.com/u/heavydawson)\
**Post date:** [August 31, 2011, 9:42am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backups-do-i-need-to-use-innobackupex-for-the-full-backup-and-each-increment/2165/1 "2011-08-31T09:42:55Z")

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The documentation here:  
[http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:xtraback](http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:xtraback) up:incremental  
, suggests that I should use innobackupex to create a full backup if it is to be usable.  
However, it’s not clear if innobackupex should also be used to create the subsequent incremental backups or whether it’s fine to use xtrabackup for those.

Any help here would be great. Thanks all!

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**Author:** ![xaprb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/49beb7/32.png) [@xaprb](https://forums.percona.com/u/xaprb)\
**Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 10:12am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/incremental-backups-do-i-need-to-use-innobackupex-for-the-full-backup-and-each-increment/2165/2 "2011-09-01T10:12:39Z")

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You can use xtrabackup alone if you like. innobackupex just does some small things such as taking backups of the MyISAM tables and do some locking for getting the binary log position (which xtrabackup itself can do in a different way).