percona xtrabackup to backup mysql database

Question

I'm trying to use percona xtrabackup to backup a mysql database. in the restoring the database according to the documentation:

rsync -avrP /data/backup/ /var/lib/mysql/

this will copy the ibdata1 as well.
what if I have want to restore the backup into an existing mysql instance with some some existing databases? would this corrupt my other databases? clearly this will overwrite existing ibdata1.

Answer 1

It depends on your MySQL version that you're restoring. The short answer is: for anything under MySQL 5.6, yeah that would corrupt your existing dataset.

However, if you're using 5.6, there is a new feature to export/import individual tablespaces and Percona Xtrabackup supports it.

Some important caveats of the importable tablespace implementation of MySQL 5.6 are as follows:

• You have to have innodb_file_per_table enabled.
• DISCARD TABLESPACE is not supported for partitioned tables meaning that transportable tablespaces is also unsupported.
• DISCARD TABLESPACE has some limitations regarding Foreign Keys

For other limitations, see the Tablespace Copying Limitations and Usage Notes section of the documentation.