This may sound a strange question but does a backup/restore cycle remove deleted records from a innodb database in the same way as in mysqldump?
Many thanks
No, xtrabackup will not remove those deleted rows from the ibd or ibdata* files because xtrabackup will copy and use those files instead re-create them.
To do that, you have to use mysqldump or if you have “innodb_file_per_table” enabled, you can use an alter table to re-create the table. “ALTER TABLE tablename ENGINE = InnoDB;”
To avid locking in the alter table, you can use “pt-online-schema-change”
Martin Arrieta.