Sometimes you might hear people talk about full backups, and differential backups versus incremental backups. What is the difference?
A full backup is pretty self-explanatory. It makes a copy of all of your MySQL data.
A differential backup, on the other hand, simply records the differences since your last full backup. The advantage of taking a differential backup is usually the space savings. Most databases have a lot of data that does not change from one backup to the next. Not copying this data into your backups can result in significantly smaller backups. In addition, depending on the backup tool used, a differential backup can be less labor-intensive for the server. If a differential backup does not have to scan all of the data to determine what has changed, the differential backup process can be significantly more efficient.
An incremental backup is a modification of a differential backup. An incremental backup records the changes since the last backup of any type, be it a differential or full backup. The advantages of incremental backups are similar to those of differential backups.
Here is an example that might explain this more clearly. Suppose that you take a full backup on Sunday. On Monday, you make a backup of all the changes since Sunday. This is a differential backup.
On Tuesday is when you begin to see the differences between the backup strategies. If you back up the changes since Sunday, then you have made a differential backup. If you back up the changes since Monday, it is an incremental backup.
Why would you choose an incremental versus a differential backup? That is a little bit out of scope for this blog post, because there are a lot of subtleties to consider. However, perhaps the biggest difference is in the way that you would restore a backup. Suppose that you need to restore your database on Friday. If you have taken differential backups all week long, you only need to restore Sunday, and then apply the changes that have happened since Sunday. If you have taken incremental backups, you must restore Sunday’s backup, and then apply changes repeatedly until you reach Friday. This can be more labor intensive, error-prone, and risky. It can also take longer.
Percona XtraBackup is capable of taking incremental backups, and when you specify the base backup as the previous incremental or full backup, you can easily make differential backups.
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