Preparing and restoring incremental backups on another server

I’ve read over the docs on making incremental backups here which is all fine.

My question is, can the preparing of the full backup and/or incrementals be done on a different server, or must it be done on the originating MySQL server.

That is, can I run a backup, then several incrementals, copy all those files to a testing server, and apply-log and prepare from there? or does it depend on binlogs from the actual server?

Thanks.