On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Dino K<[email protected]> wrote: > > The advantage of such an external SAN unit is that you can do Snapshotting > for added redundancy even though with INNODB (if you are using it) you'll > still have to manually dump the DB for snapshotting.
We use xtrabackup to copy live running mysql innodb backend servers. This is a huge advantage because the databases do not have to be locked for most of the time it is copying. Nightly backup is a two step process: 1. run innobackupex-1.5.1 telling it where to put the backup a. It copies the ibdata, all *.ibd files (if using innodb_file_per_table), and the iblogfile, all without locking the database. b. It copies the *.MY* and *.frm files, but it does lock the database while it does this. 2. run innobackupex-1.5.1 --apply-log with the path to the backup a. This uses the innodb redo/undo functionality to fix the state of the innodb files to something that can be dropped in place to a mysql server (shut down, copy, start up) and it will start clean. On our system, which is about 2000 databases (all innodb_file_per_table) and consumes 73GB, it takes 7 hours to copy the data to an nfs mounted backup location and 3 hours to "fix" it across that nfs mount. -- Regards... Todd
