We've got a database (mysql) driven application which contains business critical information, were looking at building a system that will allow us to backup the db frequently (say every 15 mins) essentially so that we minigate the danger of any data loss. Where torn between two setups :
Adding a backup jobs too a queue every 15 mins on a cron and storing these backups on another server. (To save space we would then delete most of these backups after 3 days, but keep the 06:00, 12:00, 18;00 hour versions.)
or
Is there a RAID like setup were all our data will be automatically copied to another hard drive or in this case server, in which case what would happen if we lost data, would the loss be carried to the other server (we would also run standard daily backups for our archives in edition to this) ?
or
Is there another established method for creating frequent backups ?
In my opinion, the optimal backup scheme would be following.
Delayed slave. It allows you quickly restore your database in case of master failure. It may help in case of DROP DATABASE or other wrong SQL. So, you need something additionally.
Incremental backups every day with Xtrabackup from the delayed slave. Optionally you could also check TwinDB for incremental backups.
As long as you need 15 minutes granularity you may pull binary logs from the master with mysqlbinlog from MySQL 5.6 (even if the master is 5.5 or 5.1). So, mysqlbinlog runs on a remote host and pulls logs from the master.
If you need to restore the database you have two ways.
If you can restore from the delayed slave you use that slave as a new master.
If on some reason you can't use the delayed slave (you missed the DROP command) then you restore last night copy from the incremental backup and apply binary logs since the last backup up to the moment of accident (again, if the accident is wrong DROP table you replay logs up to the last event before the DROP).
This schema will be optimal from performance standpoint (no impact on an application) and allows no data loss at all.
If you're doing backups more often than one hour, what you need is replication. Setting up a secondary database server that can serve as a hot-standby is a lot better than abusing your database with repeated reads.
If you're backing up your database frequently, look at innobackupex to snapshot your tables, or possibly LVM snapshots.
Related
I maintain a server that runs daily cron jobs to aggregate data sources and generate reports, accessible by a private Ruby on Rails application.
One of our data sources is a partial dump of one of our partner's databases. The partner runs an active application and the MySQL DB has hundreds of tables. They have given us read-only access to a relatively underpowered readonly slave of their application DB.
Because of latency issues and performance bottlenecking on their slave DB, we have been maintaining a limited local copy of their DB. We only need about 20 tables for our reports, so I only dump those tables. We also only need the data to a daily granularity, so realtime sync is not a requirement.
For a few months, I had implemented a nightly cron which streamed the dump of the necessary tables into a local production_tmp database. Then, when all tables were imported, I dropped production and renamed production_tmp to production. This was working until the DB grew to over 25GB, and we started running into disk space limitations.
For now, I have removed the redundancy step and am just streaming the dump straight into production on our local server. This feels a bit flimsy to me, and I would like to implement a safer approach. Also, currently doing the full dump/load takes our server over 2 hours, and I'd like to implement an approach that doesn't take as long. The database will only keep growing, so I'd like to implement something future proof.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
I take it you have never heard of, or considered MySQL Replication?
The idea is that you do your backup & restore once, and then configure the replica to "subscribe" to a continuous stream of changes as they are made on the primary MySQL instance. Any change applied to the primary is applied automatically to the replica within seconds. You don't have to do the backup & restore procedure again, unless the replica gets damaged.
It takes some care to set up and keep working, but it's a much more efficient method of keeping two instances in sync.
#SusannahPotts mentions hot backup and/or incremental backup. You can get both of these features for free, without paying for MySQL Enterprise using Percona XtraBackup.
You can also consider using MySQL Transportable Tablespaces.
You'll need filesystem access to run either Percona XtraBackup or MySQL Enterprise Backup. It's not possible to use these physical backup tools for Amazon RDS, for example.
One alternative is to create a replication slave in the same network as the live system, and run Percona XtraBackup on that slave, where you do have filesystem access.
Another option is to stream the binary logs to another host (see https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysqlbinlog-backup.html) and then transfer them periodically to your local instance and replay them.
Each of these solutions has pros and cons. It's hard to recommend which solution is best for you, because you aren't sharing full details about your requirements.
This was working until the DB grew to over 25GB, and we started running into disk space limitations.
Some question marks "here":
Why don't you just increase the available Diskspace for your database? 25 GB seems nothing when it comes down to disk-space?
Why don't you modify your script to: download table1, import table1_tmp, drop table1_prod, rename table1_tmp to table1_prod; rinse and repeat.
Other than that:
Why don't you ask your partner for a system with enough performance to run your reports on? I'm quite sure, he would prefer this rather than having YOU download sensitive data every day to your "local site"?
Last thought (requires MySQL Enterprise Backup https://www.mysql.de/products/enterprise/backup.html):
Rather than dumping, downloading and importing 25 GB every day:
Create a full backup
Download and import
Use Differential or incremental backups from now.
The next day you download (and import) only the data-delta: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-enterprise-backup/4.0/en/mysqlbackup.incremental.html
We have one php application and mysql server running on one of our production server.
Mysql server is currently 4GB big with intention to grow up to tens or even up to hundreds of GB.
What am curious to find out is what are the best practices for backup of mysql database in condition that application must be live under any circumstance? What is better, to have mysql replication server on which we will run backup scripts or to run on live server? What is more likely to slow down We have possibility to add additional server(s) if needed. Where do I need to store mysql dumps? Is it suggested to ftp copy mysql backup files to remote server.
What is the best practice to organize web application backup if don't have problem with number of server instances?
MySQL backup methods are documented on MySQL documentation.
The ideal backup solution will be to use MySQL Enterprise Backup. This is a licensed product sold on Oracle store. It is very fast compared to mysqldump.
MySQL Enterprise Backup: A licensed product that performs hot backups
of MySQL databases. It offers the most efficiency and flexibility when
backing up InnoDB tables, but can also back up MyISAM and other kinds
of tables.
If you are looking for a free solution with MySQL community edition, then you can install another replication server and either run mysqldump to take backup or make a raw data backup. During backup on your replication server, your main master database will be running. Since your data is big or will get bigger, it is recommended to backup raw data files. It is basically a process of copying data and log files from disk. Details are explained on MySQL documentation.
For larger databases, where mysqldump would be impractical or
inefficient, you can back up the raw data files instead. Using the raw
data files option also means that you can back up the binary and relay
logs that will enable you to recreate the slave in the event of a
slave failure.
Finally, you should copy backup files to another physical disk on the same to recover from disk failures or to another physical server to easily recover from complete server failures.
Replication is something that protects against hardware errors, for example, a hard disk crashed.
Backup - protects against software errors, for example, due to the human factor, data has been deleted from a table.
It is definitely good practice to combine both of these technologies by running a utility to create a backup on a replica. This not only reduces the load on the product database, but also covers more recovery scenarios.
In case of a hardware error, you can restore the most up-to-date data from the replica, and in cases of data corruption, you can already consider about from the what date to use the backup for recovery. Well, if your both the main server and the replica fail, then the backup will also save you.
What is the best way to make backups?
mysqldump is a good solution for small databases. This is a utility for creating logical backups nad it is included to MySQL Server. At the output, the utility creates a .sql file to recreate the database.
For large databases, it is better to use a physical backup. There are two ways on how to do it.
mysqlbackup is a utility included with MySQL Enterprise Solution. As a result, you get a binary file. Such a backup is created much faster than using mysqldump and is less load on the server.
xtrabackup, from Percona, is a lot like the MySQL Enterprise backup utility, but it's free. A more detailed comparison can be found here.
How often the backups should be made?
The more often you make backups, the better, but you can't make many such backups - since you will run out of space in the backup storage. There are two ways:
Find a compromise between the frequency of backups and the duration of storage.
Use incremental backups. The above utilities support incremental backups, but the management of such backups is more complicated (read more here)
Where the backups should be stored?
Anywhere you prefer, but not in the same place as the MySQL Server. Overall, I think using cloud storage is a good choice. Almost everyone today has a command line interface.
How to automate a backup?
The process of creating regular backups should be automated, and a person should intervene in it only in case of failure. A good backup process should include the following steps:
Creating a backup copy
Compression\Encryption
Uploading to storage
Sending success\fail notification
Removing old backups from the storage (so that it does not overflow)
The simplest script that implements this can be found, for example, here.
Something else?
Yes, the most important thing is not to create a backup and then restore it. Therefore, it is best practice to regularly test the recovery scenarios.
Happy backups!
What is better, to have mysql replication server on which we will run backup scripts or to run on live server
It depends on your db size (and time needed to dump it using mysqldump) and your reliability requirements.
If your db is relatively small and mysqldump dumps it in seconds or in a few minutes then its ok to just run scheduled backups. For most cases it is sufficient to have a daily backup which runs at a time when your app is mostly idle (at night when you clients are sleeping). You can use a nice tool automysqlbackup for that: it cares about the scheduling and backup rotation, all you need to do is to add it as your cron task and set up its config once.
Setting up a replica is only needed if:
Your backup takes long time (dozens of minutes or hours) to complete so you can not just stop your service for that long.
You can not afford loosing any history in case of main db crash. E.g. if you process financial transactions you may want to ensure that nothing will be lost if master db server dies.
In this cases you may want a replica with backups. Though you must understand that adding replication adds a new layer of problems: replicas may go out of sync, silently crash (and you will not notice that as the master and your app is running fine) etc.
I have several slave dbs replicated from the same master db, however, for one of the slaves, i would like to keep it as a backup db, which will never have rows updated or deleted.
basically the purpose is to have a backup db with all rows stored by using the replication(mysqldump is waaay slow to do the backup), no update/delete query get replicated, insert query only. i know there will be some conflicts going on no doubt, but still wonder if any filtering options on statement/query on the slave end or any other solutions.
You should never run a production database without a working backup scheme in place - at least as long as you value your data. If you fear that a wrong sql instruction can ruin your database, then you may try point in time recovery.
If you already use replication your master server will log all write/update operations to its binlog - which it will send to the slave servers for replication. You can do for example nightly backups of you complete database. If you destroy your database in the morning, you can import the backup from the night and reapply the instructions from the binlog from after the backup till before the instruction that killed your database.
You could then skip this instruction and apply the instructions that came afterwards. This can also cause consistency issues, as the instruction after the skipped instruction see different data in the database as they did when they were originally executed.
I have similar problem. I know it's old thread but it can help others:
link: mysql replication works only if I choose database by USE database
I'm currently using mysqldump to back up databases that are growing rapidly in size. Though I run it late at night, there have been occasional problems when it happens to run during a moment of high traffic (which happens at night sometimes). For example, last night one of my sites locked up just after the time of the database backup with a completely full (and non-clearing) processlist.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a better way to approach this? Putting the site in a temporary maintenance state during backup is not an option as the goal is to maximize availability (some sql dumps take awhile). One idea that comes to mind is to run both master and slave copies and shut down + back up the slave copy, leaving the master copy alone during the process. Hopefully there is a simpler solution though - I'd rather not run a slave copy for backup purposes only unless absolutely necessary. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Two thoughts:
run the slave. If nothing else, it gives you a warm spare for your production traffic in case of failure. You can also run reports and tools from it, freeing up cycles from your production server.
get to innodb and use mysqldump --single-transaction (see man page)
Good luck!
I use Percona Xtrabackup, which is similar to InnoDB Hot Backup with more functionality and is distributed for free. Xtrabackup takes snapshots without locking innodb tables and will record the current master logfile info and, if requested, the slave info if you are taking a backup from a slave.
I would recommend running a slave and doing a backup like this or with mysqldump. The slave gives you a hot backup that you can quickly switch over to and be up and running within minutes if your master blows up due to a hardware issue or various software or user error issues that take out the server. The backup with xtrabackup or mysqldump gives you a backup that you can use to restore data in case you accidentally drop a table or delete some rows you shouldn't have, since the replicated server wouldn't save you there.
I have a scenario where there are multiple mysql 4.x servers. These databases were supposed to be replicating to another server. After checking things out on a slave it appears that this slave has not replicated any databases in some time.
Some of these databases are > 4G in size and one is 43G(which resides on another server). Has anyone out there replicated databases without creating a snapshot to copy over to a slave? I cannot shutdown the master server because of the downtime. It will probably take over an hour and 40 minutes to create a snapshot. So this is out of the question.
I was going to perform a load data from master on the slave to pull everything from scratch. Any idea how long this will take on databases ranging from 1-4G and the 43G database will be for another day. All of the tables on the master are myIsam so I don't think I will have a problem with the load from master method.
What are the best methods on the slave to clean things up or reset things so I can just start from a clean slate?
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance
You need a snapshot to start replication. Snapshots require either the database to be locked (at least) read-only. So you can have a consistent place to start from.
Downtime is a necessary thing, customers usually understand it as long as it doesn't happen too often.