Why not buy a cheap NAS of say 5T and mount it on a MySQL slave. Then you have oodles of space for online historical backups there. You could also share it as an NFS export to all the other MySQL slaves. There is also a utility called “dar” (disk archive) as an alternative to a tarball. Just had a thought, maybe this idea could be combined with rsnapshot for space efficient backups using hard-links.

Peter seemed to suggest that a read-write snapshot can be directly mounted and then you can let InnoDB recovery do it’s thing. Only way is to experiment it in a safe environment first.

thank you for this great article!

Following this blog we arrived at the conclusion to use lvm snapshots on the slave servers to prevent slaves from being used excessively ..
So we are faced with a situation that our analytics teams issues heavy raw mysql queries that run for hours in some cases days on our replicated slave servers because of which as you can imagine performance goes for a toss and that causes slave to slow down and not sync up with the master . Now some of these slaves run on LVM’s which have already occupied most of the file system space in that particular volume group they are residing in , now taking a mysqldump is a long process and can’t afford the slave shutdown so we need to pursue other avenues like lvm snapshot . So i can easily lock the mysql tables and take a lvm snapshot with lvcreate in a quick seconds and then release the mysql lock .

Now that I have the snapshot of the original volume lets say of 1 TB , one way to use this snapshot is to mount the snapshot and take a backup of 1tb data say tar which again takes a lot of time to tar it and then becomes even more challenging to save that tar backup else where especially when you dont have space on the same server .

what are the options of using that snapshot and how ? the purpose is to use this snapshot or the tar backup data and use another my sql instance to use that data and have analytics team to use it as long as they issues queries on tar backup on another volume it wont impact our performance since it has nothing to do with slave ??

can we also directly mount snapshot as read only and configure mysql to use it , will that work ? and will that impact on the original volume in any way ?>

what could be other solution to this mess that i haven’t thought about apart from mysqldump ???

Tariq

MySQL backup is sometimes very hard to do effectively. MySQL provides various options for backup, but many of them are simply unsuitable for large systems, particularly if they need to remain active during backups. Percona’s XtraBackup is an open-sour…

Thanks
Frank