MariaDB Backup Released With MariaDB Server 10.1.23

MariaDB Backup, a new tool for performing physical online backups of InnoDB, Aria, and MyISAM tables from MariaDB Server, was released as part of the maintenance release of MariaDB Server 10.1.23. MariaDB Backup is available on Linux and Windows.

MariaDB Server 10.1 introduced MariaDB InnoDB Compression and Data-at-Rest Encryption. For both, we have seen high interest from the users of MariaDB Server. However, existing backup solutions from our ecosystem did not support full backup capability for these features. 

If you are running MariaDB Server on Microsoft Windows, an open-source tool for creating physical online backups did not exist.

To address our customers and community users' concerns, we decided to provide a backup solution that would support full backup capability for MariaDB Server that includes encrypted and compressed data.

We also have added Microsoft Windows Support to MariaDB Backup to provide our users and customers an open-source solution for creating physical online backups. 

The most obvious way to do this was to create a solution based on the well-known and used backup tool called Percona XtraBackup. We extended it and named the solution MariaDB Backup.

So why have we decided to change the name of the tool and executables? Mainly to avoid confusion, to enable the use of both tools in the environment a DBA has to maintain, and to give an option to stay with Percona XtraBackup for servers not using MariaDB Data-at-Rest or InnoDB Compression, while at the same time use MariaDB Backup when Data-at-Rest Encryption or InnoDB Compression is needed. Or one can just use MariaDB Backup as a full backup solution.

MariaDB Backup Releases

First of all, the version of MariaDB Backup provided with MariaDB 10.1.23 is of Alpha maturity. We encourage our community and customers to test this version but do not recommend using it in a production environment. Please add comments to this blog post about successful tests. Relying on bug reports to decide on changing the maturity of a software is not as good as knowing about the successful use/testing of it.

You will not find MariaDB Backup as a separately downloadable product at this time. MariaDB Backup will be provided as a separate package included in new releases of MariaDB Server 10.1, and also in the future with MariaDB Server 10.2. 

MariaDB Backup is tightly connected to the storage engines XtraDB/InnoDB and maintaining MariaDB Backup as part of the Server enables us to get the tool tested against changes in the Server and storage engines.

Using MariaDB Backup

MariaDB Backup is currently based on Percona XtraBackup 2.3.8 and therefore provides the same functionality plus

• Backup/Restore of data-at-rest encrypted XtraDB/InnoDB tables.
• Backup/Restore when InnoDB Compression is used.
• Backup/Restore of data-at-rest encrypted Aria tables.
• Using MariaDB Backup for an SST with Galera Cluster, when data-at-rest encryption is used.
• Support of Microsoft Windows.

Limitations:

• Backup tool based encryption (gcrypt) is not supported.
• No symlink to innobackupex — make use of the parameter --innobackupex.

The command to use MariaDB Backup is mariabackup <params>.

To use MariaDB Backup for Galera Cluster SST, the script wsrep_sst_mariabackup.sh is provided and the Galera configuration setting is used: wsrep_sst_method = mariabackup.

Summary

MariaDB Backup enables you to:

• Create backups when you use the MariaDB Server based compression for table types InnoDB/XtraDB.
• Create Backups of MariaDB Server for data-at-rest encrypted InnoDB/XtraDB tables.
• Create MariaDB Galera Cluster SST for data-at-rest encrypted tables.
• Create online backups also for MariaDB Server running on Microsoft Windows.