As explained in Section 1.5, “Overview of Restoring a Database”, the
mysqlbackup option to perform a restore
operation is copy-back. It requires the database
server to be already shut down, then copies the data files, logs,
and other backed-up files from the backup directory back to their
original locations, and performs any required postprocessing on
them.
Example 5.4. Shutting Down and Restoring a Database
mysqladmin --defaults-file=/usr/local/mysql/my.cnf --user=root --password shutdown
mysqlbackup --defaults-file=/usr/local/mysql/my.cnf \
--backup-dir=/export/backups/full \
copy-back