Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.
In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!
- Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
- Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
- Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
- While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix at the end of the tar backup file name (or the rsync target directory name) now indicates that it is incomplete. (Robin)
- The my.cnf configuration file is now included in the backup. (Robin)
- Added the ability to run an extra FLUSH TABLES on busy databases where lvcreate might take a long time (and may overrun the interactivity timeout on the connection, losing the lock). (Robin)
- Added option "--pidfile" to provide an alternative PID file location for the second server instance that is started to perform the InnoDB recovery on the snapshot prior to backing it up (Otherwise it may default to using the same pid file location that the running server uses and safe_mysqld will abort) - thanks to Kristian Köhntopp for making me aware of this problem.
- Before discarding the snapshot LV, the output of "lvs <snapshot>" is now printed out for diagnostics. It contains useful information like "how much percent of the backing store was used", which helps tuning the size of the snapshot LV.
- Added option "--skip-flush-tables" that performs the snapshot without flushing the tables to disk beforehand (which is not supported by InnoDB tables anyway) - this would save time, as the flushing can take a while, depending on the buffer sizes. (Thanks to Peter Zaitsev for the suggestion)
Version 0.6 is now available for download from http://www.lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/ (source tarball and RPM). I also provide RPM packagages for a number of additional platforms via my home:LenzGr repository on the fabolous openSUSE Build Service.
Enjoy! Feedback, patches and suggestions are welcome - please consider joining the mylvmbackup mailing list to discuss your experiences with this tool.
