If you don’t have any Percona software already on your server, don’t worry. You don’t need to use the Percona distribution to use xtrabackup. But you will need their repository installed. Here’s how:

From there simply install xtrabackup:

The innobackupex utility comes with xtrabackup, and does the heavy lifting. So we can just use that to perform the backup.

Now we’ll see a new directory created inside /data/backup which looks something like this:

The backup which xtrabackup created above is of the current state of the database. However there are transactions which are incomplete, and others which have not been flushed to their datafiles. In other words the backup as-is would be similar to a datadir if your database crashed. Some additional transactions must still be applied.

To apply those changes, use the following command on the backup directory you created above:

At minimum you need to set the server_id to a unique value. The IP address with the periods removed can make a good server_id.

One very nice thing about xtrabackup is that it automatically captures the master info, so we’ll easily be able to find out the current log file & log position! That’s a very nice feature.

Find out where the slave should start from:

Now tell MySQL where the new master is:

Now start the slave:

Lastly verify that it is running properly:

You should see the following:

Once you have replication up and running, you should test it as well. I like to keep a test table installed in the test schema for this purpose. Then you can test as follows:

Then verify that you see that row on your new slave:

Once you’ve used xtrabackup a few times, I’m sure you’ll be converted. It makes building a slave much simpler in MySQL. It captures the file & position for you and what’s more there is no dump file to apply – which typically takes a lot of time too! All in all the tool makes you more efficient, and allows you to snapshot slaves anytime you like.

Now that you have replication working, you should add the icing to the cake. MySQL’s statement based replication is powerful, but even when it’s not throwing errors, the databases can get silently out of sync. In a future article we’ll discuss how to bulletproof your replication setup with a tool that performs checksums on your tables. That will give you professional enterprise class data protection in MySQL.