5.1.7 Advanced: Preparing and Restoring a Directory Backup

A directory backup, just like a single-file backup, can be prepared and restored using the copy-back-and-apply-log command as explained at the beginning of Section 5.1, “Performing a Restore Operation”.

Example 5.10 Restoring a Backup Directory using copy-back-and-apply-log

mysqlbackup --defaults-file=/usr/local/mysql/my.cnf \
  --backup-dir=/export/backups/full \
    copy-back-and-apply-log

However, two alternatives exist for directory backups:

Perform the apply log operation on the raw backup right after the backup, or anytime before restore, using the apply-log command. You can run this step on the same database server where you did the backup, or transfer the raw backup files to a different system first, to limit the CPU and storage overhead on the database server. Here are some examples of doing that, on different kinds of directory backups:
Example 5.11 Applying the Log to a Backup
This example runs mysqlbackup to roll forward the data files so that the data is ready to be restored:
```
mysqlbackup --backup-dir=/export/backups/2011-06-21__8-36-58 apply-log
```
That command creates InnoDB log files (ib_logfile*) within the backup directory and applies log records to the InnoDB data files (ibdata* and *.ibd). For a compressed backup, there is no need to add the --uncompress option.
For backups that are non-incremental, you can combine the initial backup and the apply-log steps using the backup-and-apply-log command.

After the backup has been prepared, you can now restore it using the copy-back command:

mysqlbackup --defaults-file=/usr/local/mysql/my.cnf \
  --backup-dir=/export/backups/full \
    copy-back