The mysqlbackup command, a cross-platform replacement for the innobackup command, is now available on Windows. Windows users can back up tables from other storage engines besides InnoDB, such as MyISAM tables, without writing their own wrapper scripts.

The mysqlbackup command now includes all the capabilities of the former ibbackup command, making that command obsolete.

This documentation refers to the mysqlbackup command exclusively.

The mysqlbackup command is a C program connecting to the server through the MySQL API, rather than a Perl script that runs the mysql command. Because it does not run the actual mysql command, it does not support the --mysql-extra-args option of the innobackup, but otherwise the syntax is compatible.

If this implementation change presents any issues for former users of the InnoDB Hot Backup product (for example, if you customized the innobackup script or relied on specific mysqld options passed through the --mysql-extra-args option), please submit requirements against the new mysqlbackup command.

Currently, the old ibbackup and innobackup commands are still supplied as aliases or copies of the mysqlbackup command. When mysqlbackup is run under these names, it accepts the same old option syntax from those commands. This backward compatibility is for troubleshooting in case of upgrade issues as you transition to the mysqlbackup command.

Backups produced by the InnoDB Hot Backup product can be restored by the MySQL Enterprise Backup product.

The streaming backup feature is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup.

The single-file backup feature is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup.

The incremental backup feature is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup.

Support for the Barracuda file format is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup. Once you upgrade your database servers to MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin, or MySQL 5.5 and higher where support for the new file format is built in, you need to use MySQL Enterprise Backup to ensure you can back up all InnoDB tables.

The MySQL Enterprise Backup product includes some new performance optimizations, such as the posix_fadvise() system call.

A new logging capability records the progress of running backup jobs, and historical details for completed backup jobs. For details, see Section 7.4, “Using the MySQL Enterprise Backup Logs”.

The mysqlbackup command has extra flexibility for specifying the MySQL connection information. It can read the user, password, port and socket options from the [client] group of your default or user-specified configuration file. If you supply the --password option without an argument, you are prompted to enter the password interactively.

The optimization within the ibbackup command that skipped copying unused space within InnoDB tablespace files, is available within mysqlbackup only in combination with the --compressed option. Use compressed backups if this storage overhead is significant for your data.