When to run --prepare

MySQL & MariaDB Percona XtraBackup
1

Can anyone give me some more info on when to run --prepare?

Can you run --prepare on another machine (after you transferred a tarred/gzipped backup)? I’ve done this both locally and remote and it seems to work, but clarification would be great.

Also, is it safe to run --prepare and still run an incremental backup on the prepared data or must you keep the data unprepared until you restore and roll forward all the incremental backups?

2

Yes, it can be done remotely. You can do a --prepare and then do incrementals afterwards, but you need to do --apply-log-only in that case. References:

http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:xtraback up:prepare (I’m updating this to help answer this question for others)
http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:xtraback up:incremental#preparing_the_backups