MySQL Backups - Full vs incremental - innobackupex

Question

So I'm implementing a backup strategy for our project and came across some text which I need absolute clarification, false positives are the death nell of IT.

I am looking to do your typical backup strategy, weekly full back-up with daily incremental backups. Here's the rub:

According to the docs, when doing a full backup you have to 'prep' it, which is to run all uncommitted transactions etc. You can prep the backup by using the innobackupex --apply-log /path/to/BACKUP-DIR command.

But according to these docs, if you do an incremental backup, you have to 'prep' it differently, using the innobackupex --apply-log --redo-only BASE-DIR command.

My plan is to write a cronjob to do a full backup on Sunday @ 12:01am, and an incremental on M-Sa @ 12:01 am. So my question is, should the cronjob prep every backup with the --redo-only flag, to ensure that full backup can be merged with following incremental backups?

Answer 1

No, you don't need to prep every backup. You only need to create the full backup on Sunday and then create the incrementals from Monday to Saturday.

Full:

innobackupex --user=USER --password=PASSWORD /path/to/backup/dir/

Incr:

innobackupex --incremental /path/to/inc/mon --incremental-basedir=$FULLBACKUP --user=USER --password=PASSWORD

innobackupex --incremental /path/to/inc/tue --incremental-basedir=/path/to/inc/mon --user=USER --password=PASSWORD

The prepare phase (--apply-log) is only needed when you restore the backup.