I’m backing up a ~250G database with 140k tables, with some tables partitioned into ~100 partitions. When I extract and prepare the tar archive, the minimum size of each .ibd file has grown from 96k to 1M. This is especially painful in my situation, as all empty partitions also grow to 1M.
Overall, this causes the data set to nearly triple in size. Even with a larger storage volume, I would have to run optimize table on every single table to shrink the data set to a more manageable size.
Is this a bi-product of the tar stream? Or just something that is unavoidable with Xtrabackup/Innobackupex?