MySQL® Administrator's Bible

Chapter 13. Backups and Recovery

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Backing up MySQL

• Recovering from crashes

• Planning for disasters

The most important responsibility a database administrator has is performing backups and recoveries. In almost every case, data is an organization's primary asset and keeping that asset safe is of utmost importance. Backups and recovery are necessary in case of disaster, but are also critical in setting up replication, upgrading, migrating, and troubleshooting unexpected data changes.

This chapter has two goals. The first goal is to give an overview of the various methods of backups available to a database administrator. The second goal is to help you to understand that there is more to backups and recovery than just being able to perform the actual operations of backup and recovery. Backup and recovery are parts of the big picture of planning for disasters and recovering from them, as well as setting up new slave servers and test/development environments.

Backing Up MySQL

A number of terms are associated with backup and recovery. Before covering the various methods of performing backups, it's important to define some terminology first:

• Logical Backup — A logical backup is created by saving information that represents the logical database structures using SQL statements like CREATE DATABASE, CREATE TABLE, and INSERT. It is not correct to say that a logical backup is a text representation of the database server because there can be non-text binary data in logical backup. Other ...