# Will (partial) restoring destroy the fullbackup for further incremental backups?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/will-partial-restoring-destroy-the-fullbackup-for-further-incremental-backups/4504>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [November 9, 2015, 9:09am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/will-partial-restoring-destroy-the-fullbackup-for-further-incremental-backups/4504 "2015-11-09T09:09:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Steiner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e99b99/32.png) [@Frank\_Steiner](https://forums.percona.com/u/Frank_Steiner)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2015, 9:09am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/will-partial-restoring-destroy-the-fullbackup-for-further-incremental-backups/4504/1 "2015-11-09T09:09:58Z")

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Hi,  
our plan is to make a fullbackup with xtrabackup once, then create an incremental backup and merge (=apply) it with the full backup and repeat that every day. So that we have one backup directory that is updated with the incremental deltas every day. We would use “–apply-log-only” to make sure we could continue to create incremental backups.

Now, when we would need to restore some tables (or the whole backup), we must fully prepare it, i.e. without the --apply-log-only, did I get that right? If so, it would mean that even after only restoring a single table (using --export) the full backup could no longer be used for incremental backups and that we had to create a new full backup.

Is that right? To avoid tainting the full backup, could we just copy the the “main” files (ibdata1,xtrabackup\_checkpoints etc.) and the tables we would like to restore to some other dir and perform the --prepare --export there? Or is that only possible on a complete copy of the full backup?

cu,  
Frank