DDL, including TRUNCATE TABLE, is not permitted during a cloning operation. This limitation should be considered when selecting data sources. A workaround is to use dedicated donor instances, which can accommodate DDL operations being blocked while data is cloned. Concurrent DML is permitted.

An instance cannot be cloned from a different MySQL server version or release. The donor and recipient must have exactly the same MySQL server version and release. For example, you cannot clone between MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8.0, or between MySQL 8.0.19 and MySQL 8.0.20. The clone plugin is only supported in MySQL 8.0.17 and higher.

Only a single MySQL instance can be cloned at a time. Cloning multiple MySQL instances in a single cloning operation is not supported.

The X Protocol port specified by mysqlx_port is not supported for remote cloning operations (when specifying the port number of the donor MySQL server instance in a CLONE INSTANCE statement).

The clone plugin does not support cloning of MySQL server configurations. The recipient MySQL server instance retains its configuration, including persisted system variable settings (see Section 5.1.9.3, “Persisted System Variables”.)

The clone plugin does not support cloning of binary logs.

The clone plugin only clones data stored in InnoDB. Other storage engine data is not cloned. MyISAM and CSV tables stored in any schema including the sys schema are cloned as empty tables.

Connecting to the donor MySQL server instance through MySQL Router is not supported.

Local cloning operations do not support cloning of general tablespaces that were created with an absolute path. A cloned tablespace file with the same path as the source tablespace file would cause a conflict.