In this chapter, we discussed the various backup techniques and tools that can be used with a MariaDB server. A DBA should know all the backup methods, because each one can be the best choice for some types of workloads.

We discussed how to perform a physical or logical complete backup. When we have a complete backup, we can then perform incremental backups, which are always smaller than complete backups and take less time. Then, we discussed how to take partial backups that do not include all tables from all databases. The restoring of all types of backups has also been explained.

Backups of InnoDB tables are slightly more complicated and, before MariaDB 10.0, required the server to be stopped. We discussed how to back up and restore InnoDB tables. Special attention has been paid to Percona XtraBackup, which is optimized for InnoDB and allows taking fast, physical backups without stopping the server.

When a table is corrupted, restoring an old backup is not always the only solution. We discussed how to repair a table. The procedure strictly depends on the storage engines. The InnoDB recovery process is used at server startup. Some other storage engines support table repairs using SQL statements. Two special tools allow us to repair Aria and MyISAM tables.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how to set up and manage a replication environment.