How do backups work in vitess? #

Backup and Restore are integrated features provided by tablets managed by Vitess. Vitess uses backups for provisioning new tablets in an existing shard.

Vitess supports plugins for a number of Backup Storage Services and Backup Engines. The supported plugins are listed in the documentation.

What is XtraBackup and how does Vitess use it? #

Percona XtraBackup is an open source backup utility for MySQL. You can delve into Percona’s documentation on XtraBackup.

XtraBackup can be used as a backup engine in Vitess. Using it requires configuration using command-line flags.

What are my options to restore in vitess? #

When a tablet starts, Vitess checks the value of the --restore_from_backup command-line flag to determine whether to restore a backup to that tablet.

• If the flag is present, Vitess tries to restore the most recent backup from the Backup Storage system when starting the tablet.
• If the flag is absent, Vitess does not try to restore a backup to the tablet. The MYSQL database associated with the tablet will be empty.

For more information on restoring and managing backups please follow the link here.