Backup and Recovery - High Performance MySQL - page 659

Percona XtraBackup works by “tailing” the InnoDB log files in a background thread,
then copying the InnoDB data files. This is a slightly involved process, with special
checks to ensure that data is copied consistently. When all the data files are copied, the
log-copying thread finishes, too. The result is a copy of all the data, but at different
points in time. The logs can now be applied to the data files, using InnoDB's crash
recovery routines, to bring all of the data files into a consistent state. This is referred to
as the prepare process. Once prepared, the backup is fully consistent and contains all
committed transactions as of the ending point of the file copy process. All of this hap-
pens completely externally to MySQL, so it doesn't need to connect to or access
MySQL in any way.
The wrapper script adds the ability to recover a backup by copying it back to its original
location. There's also Lachlan Mulcahy's XtraBackup Manager project for even more
functionality; see http://code.google.com/p/xtrabackup-manager/ for more information.
mylvmbackup
Lenz Grimmer's mylvmbackup ( http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/ ) is a Perl
script to help automate MySQL backups via LVM snapshots. It gets a global read lock,
creates a snapshot, and releases the lock. It then compresses the data with tar and
removes the snapshot. It names the tarball according to the timestamp at which the
backup was made. It has a few more advanced options, but in general it's a straight-
forward tool for performing LVM backups.
Zmanda Recovery Manager
Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, or ZRM ( http://www.zmanda.com ) , comes in
both free (GPL) and commercial versions. The enterprise edition comes with a man-
agement console that provides a graphical web-based interface for configuration,
backup, verification, recovery, reporting, and scheduling. The open source edition is
not crippled in any way, but it doesn't include some of the extra niceties, such as the
web-based console.
True to its name, ZRM is actually a backup and recovery manager, not just a single
tool. It wraps its own functionality around standard tools and techniques, such as
mysqldump , LVM snapshots, and Percona XtraBackup. It automates much of the te-
dious work of backups and recovery.
mydumper
Several current and former MySQL engineers created mydumper as a replacement for
mysqldump , based on their years of experience. It is a multithreaded (parallel) backup
and restore toolset for MySQL and Drizzle with a lot of nice features. Many people will
probably find the speed of multithreaded backups and restores to be this tool's most
attractive feature. Although we know of some people using it in production, we don't