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It is important to back up your databases so that you can recover your data and be up and running again in case problems occur, such as system crashes, hardware failures, or users deleting data by mistake. Backups are also essential as a safeguard before upgrading a MySQL installation, and they can be used to transfer a MySQL installation to another system or to set up replication slave servers.
MySQL offers a variety of backup strategies from which you can choose the methods that best suit the requirements for your installation. This chapter discusses several backup and recovery topics with which you should be familiar:
Types of backups: Logical versus physical, full versus incremental, and so forth
Methods for creating backups
Recovery methods, including point-in-time recovery
Backup scheduling, compression, and encryption
Table maintenance, to enable recovery of corrupt tables
Additional Resources
Resources related to backup or to maintaining data availability include the following:
A forum dedicated to backup issues is available at http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?93.
Details for mysqldump, mysqlhotcopy, and other MySQL backup programs can be found in Chapter 4, MySQL Programs.
The syntax of the SQL statements described here is given in Chapter 12, SQL Statement Syntax.
For additional information about
InnoDBbackup procedures, see Section 13.6.7, “Backing Up and Recovering anInnoDBDatabase”.Replication enables you to maintain identical data on multiple servers. This has several benefits, such as enabling client query load to be distributed over servers, availability of data even if a given server is taken offline or fails, and the ability to make backups with no impact on the master by using a slave server. See Chapter 17, Replication.
MySQL Cluster provides a high-availability, high-redundancy version of MySQL adapted for the distributed computing environment. See MySQL Cluster NDB 6.X/7.X, which provides information about MySQL Cluster NDB 7.0 and 7.1 (based on MySQL 5.1 but containing the latest improvements and fixes for the
NDBCLUSTERstorage engine).NoteThe
NDBCLUSTERstorage engine is currently not supported in MySQL 5.5.Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) is another high-availability solution. It works by replicating a block device from a primary server to a secondary server at the block level. See Chapter 14, High Availability and Scalability