# XtraBackup on small subset of tables and mysqldump otherwise ?

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/xtrabackup-on-small-subset-of-tables-and-mysqldump-otherwise/3419>\
**Category:** Percona XtraBackup\
**Created:** [April 23, 2014, 2:26pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/xtrabackup-on-small-subset-of-tables-and-mysqldump-otherwise/3419 "2014-04-23T14:26:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Francy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/87869e/32.png) [@Francy](https://forums.percona.com/u/Francy)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2014, 2:26pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/xtrabackup-on-small-subset-of-tables-and-mysqldump-otherwise/3419/1 "2014-04-23T14:26:44Z")

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I have ~1,000 MyISAM and ~1,000 InnoDB tables that I am currently doing daily full backups with mysqldump. I have a month’s worth of daily backups and a year’s worth of monthly backups.

There are ~60 InnoDB tables that are in the 1G to 50G size that take a fairly long time to backup with mysqldump. I’d like to use XtraBackup for those 60-ish tables using the --tables-file=xtrabackup.tables option with a full backup on the 1st of the month and incrementals otherwise.

1. Is there any reason why that would not work ?

When I do table restores I assume that I would have to go the route of something like CREATE TABLE tmp\_original\_table LIKE original\_table; ALTER TABLE tmp\_original\_table DISCARD TABLESPACE; \< copy .ibd and .exp files for table(s) being restored from backup dir to db dir \> ; ALTER TABLE tmp\_original\_table IMPORT TABLESPACE; etc.

There are times when I want to recover a single row from a table, but I don’t know when the good data last existed. With my mysqldump backups I can simply go through the backups for the given table day by day until I find the good data.

1. How might I do this day-by-day search for the data that I want when using XtraBackup incremental backups ?

Francis