Question

I’m using the following command to create an incremental backup in MySQL

mysqldump -uusername -ppassword db_name --flush-logs > D:\dbname_incremental_backup.sql

However the sql file is as big as a complete backup, and obviously importing it takes a long time as well. Could anybody tell me how to create incremental backups and import just the new data from each incremental backup rather than the whole database again?

I have read all the related articles in dev.mysql.com but still can not understand how to do it.

Answer 1

mysqldump only creates full backups. There’s no built-in functionality for incremental backups.

For that sort of thing you probably want Percona xtrabackup but that will only work with InnoDB tables. This is usually not an issue since using MyISAM tables is considered extremely harmful.