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.