xtrabackup datadir must be empty - options?

[IGGt]

In the Documentation for XtraBackup it says that

The datadir must be empty; Percona XtraBackup innobackupex --copy-back option will not copy
over existing files.

Is there any way round this?

My DataDir is ` directory but it still wont copy-back, giving error:

.

[scott.nemes]

Hi IGGt;

You can just manually move the files yourself. However if you leave the backups directory in the data directory, it will show up in MySQL as a defunct database (i.e. the “lost+found” you see often). In MySQL 5.6.3+ you can use the ignore-db-dir option to ignore the backups directory, but if you are running 5.5 then I’d figure out how to store your backups somewhere else preferably.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_ignore-db-dir

-Scott

[IGGt]

cheers for that. In the end I created mysql/data/ and mysql/backups/ directories which enabled me to keep them separate.