Create an individual partitions backup

Percona XtraBackup lets you back up individual partitions because partitions are regular tables with specially formatted names. The only requirement for this feature is to enable the innodb_file_per_table option on the server.

There is one caveat about using this kind of backup: you can not copy back the prepared backup. Restoring partial backups should be done by importing the tables.

There are three ways of specifying which part of the whole data will be backed up: regular expressions (--tables), enumerating the tables in a file (--tables-file) or providing a list of databases (--databases).

The regular expression provided to this option will be matched against the fully qualified database name and table name, in the form of database-name.table-name.

If the partition 0 is not backed up, Percona XtraBackup cannot generate a .cfg file. MySQL 8.0 stores the table metadata in partition 0.

For example, this operation takes a back-up of the partition p4 from the table name located in the database imdb:

$ xtrabackup --tables=^imdb[.]name#p#p4 --backup

If partition 0 is not backed up, the following errors may occur:

The error message

xtrabackup: export option not specified
xtrabackup: error: cannot find dictionary record of table imdb/name#p#p4

Note that this option is passed to xtrabackup --tables and is matched against each table of each database, the directories of each database will be created even if they are empty.