process to restore a database from incremental backups

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:17

Hi, I do weekly full and daily incrementals using VM backup function. I want to restore just a mysql db from one of the incrementals. What is the process to restore just the database using the full and incrementals without overwriting the entire virtual server? I would like to be able to restore the data to a separate database server to look at the data and not overwrite the current production database.

Thank you

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:31

Howdy -- "Incremental" refers to just the files. The data in the database is a full backup, even in an incremental backup.

To restore just the data in the database, you can go into Backup and Restore -> Restore Backup, and in "Features and settings", you can set it to restore just "Contents of server's MySQL databases".

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:40

Thanks. Follow up question:

I would like to view the contents inside the backup rather than "restore". I tried downloading the tar.gz to a Windows desktop and opening it up but it's not in a "friendly" format. Seems like a lot of folders with data inside the folders. Is there a way to extract the backup file data in a more "human readable" way?

Thank you

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:45

If you have a tool that can view tar archives, what you'd want to do is look for the .backup directory, and in there you'll see the MySQL backups.

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:48

I have 7-zip which is able to extract tar files, but it shows a lot of numbered folders, and not the folder hierarchy of the folders on the server. Any suggestion for a tool for Windows?

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 11:52

Here's what it looks like inside the tar:

Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 12:03

Yeah, that's fairly strange :-)

Tar stores the actual file and directory names, so you should be seeing the various directories from your homedir in there.

I'm unfortunately not really familiar with tools for viewing tar archives on Windows. We're primarily Linux users around here :-)

If you wanted to use your server to extract that, you could use this command to unpack it:

tar zxvf domain.tld.tar.gz

And then, go into the directory it creates, followed by the .backup directory in there.

In the .backup directory, you'll see a bunch of metadata related files, along with backups of your various databases.

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 12:06

I'll give that a try.

Follow-follow-up.

is it possible to restore a backup of abc.com domain (files and folders) to temp_abc.com on the same server? The GUI doesn't seem to allow it. I want to restore files but not overwrite production.

Submitted by responsiveny on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 12:12

Using UNIX worked to view the files. Thanks