Restoring XtraBackup files onto a Windows located Database

MySQL & MariaDB Percona XtraBackup
1

I currently work in a MySQL on Windows based environment (mainly 5.5), but we are gradually moving more and more to MySQL on Linux (in fact we now have more Linux Servers than Windows). At present we use MySQLDump for our backups, but this is getting increasingly time consuming and unwieldy, so I am looking at alternatives.

If we use XtraBackup to take backups from one of our Linux DB’s can we restore that file onto a Windows machine if required?

2

I think restore will work as long as architecture is same. You need to take backup and prepare it too before restore on linux box by using Percona-Xtrabackup tool. However, I never tested it myself but I hope that restore will work.

3

FYI - I tested this myself, and can confirm, that with a bit of fiddling, this does indeed work. You need to make sure your my.cnf / my.ini files match up for key things like logfile size. Also the version of MySQL on Windows needs to be the correct version for innobackupex. e.g. I used XtraBackup 2.2 to backup my MySQL 5.5. database, and restored it back to a MySQL 5.5 database ok on Linux. On windows however it wouldn’t start unless I restored it to a MySQL 5.6 database.