# When to run --prepare

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/when-to-run-prepare/2120>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [February 22, 2011, 11:41am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/when-to-run-prepare/2120 "2011-02-22T11:41:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![johnml](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ecb155/32.png) [@johnml](https://forums.percona.com/u/johnml)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2011, 11:41am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/when-to-run-prepare/2120/1 "2011-02-22T11:41:27Z")

</div>

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?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![xaprb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/49beb7/32.png) [@xaprb](https://forums.percona.com/u/xaprb)\
**Post date:** [February 23, 2011, 1:25pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/when-to-run-prepare/2120/2 "2011-02-23T13:25:57Z")

</div>

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](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](http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtrabackup:xtraback) up:incremental#preparing\_the\_backups