Why does innobackupex require access to mysql data dir when backing up a remote host?

Hello,

I am trying to use innobackupex to backup a MySQL server which runs on another server:

“innobackupex --no-timestamp --parallel=4 --user=root --host=hostname --password=“password””

This will fail with the following error:

“xtrabackup: Can’t change dir to ‘/var/lib/mysql’ (Errcode: 2)
xtrabackup: cannot my_setwd /app/mysql”

Errorcode 2 is of course “no such file or folder”.

The question is, since i can give it a remote host option, should it not be possible to do a complete backup of that remote host?

Can i simply create a empty “/var/lib/mysql”-folder, or is it something i am missing here?

regards,
Tor