Safe backup of PXC / Galera cluster

Question

I have 3 nodes 'master master' cluster and using PXC 5.6

But I am only using a single node for both read and write.

Before using pxc, i was using standalone Mariadb 5.5 and I was taking backup using xtrabackup.

My question is, how should I take backup of PXC? Should i take full and incremental backup for the node which is NOT used for read and write without any additional precautions just like i was taking for mariadb 5.5?

For e.g: xtrabackup --backup --target-dir=/data/backup

Is there any officially recommended way to safely take backups of pxc?

I want to take backup so that if there is database corruption, I can start my cluster from scratch using that backup.

Answer 1

Here's another option:

mysql> SET GLOBAL wsrep_desync=1;
shell# <execute backup>
mysql> SET GLOBAL wsrep_desync=0;

Just make sure to take the backup from the non-write node and no traffic is going through the node that's running XtraBackup. Test first on non-production systems.

https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtradb-cluster/5.6/wsrep-system-index.html#wsrep_desync

Answer 2

One way to take a backup of PXC or Galera:

1. Remove a node from the cluster. (not the one you are writing to)
2. Take the backup on it.
3. Put the node back into the cluster. (It will automatically resync.)

5.5 is rather out of date; recommend you plan on moving forward.