The various kinds of backup techniques are classified on a scale ranging from hot (the most desirable) to cold (the most disruptive). Your goal is to keep the database system, and associated applications and web sites, operating and responsive while the backup is in progress.

Hot backups are performed while the database is running. This type of backup does not block normal database operations. It captures even changes that occur while the backup is happening. For these reasons, hot backups are desirable when your database “grows up”: when the data is large enough that the backup takes significant time, and when your data is important enough to your business so that you must capture every last change, without taking your application, web site, or web service offline.

MySQL Enterprise Backup does a hot backup of all InnoDB tables. MyISAM and other non-InnoDB tables are backed up last, using the warm backup technique: the database continues to run, but the system is in a read-only state during that phase of the backup.

You can also perform cold backups while the database is stopped. To avoid service disruption, you would typically perform such a backup from a replica, which can be stopped without taking down the entire application or web site.

Points to Remember

To back up as much data as possible during the hot backup phase, you can designate InnoDB as the default storage engine for new tables, or convert existing tables to use the InnoDB storage engine. (In MySQL 5.5 and higher, InnoDB is now the default storage engine for new tables.)

During hot and warm backups, information about the structure of the database is retrieved automatically through a database connection. For a cold backup, you must specify file locations through configuration files or command-line options.