The xbstream binary overview

To support simultaneous compression and streaming, a new custom streaming format called xbstream was introduced to Percona XtraBackup in addition to the TAR format. That was required to overcome some limitations of traditional archive formats such as tar, cpio and others which did not allow streaming dynamically generated files, for example dynamically compressed files. Other advantages of xbstream over traditional streaming/archive format include ability to stream multiple files concurrently (so it is possible to use streaming in the xbstream format together with the –parallel option) and more compact data storage.

For details on the command-line options, see xbcloud command-line options.

The utility tries to minimize its impact on the OS page cache by using the appropriate posix_fadvise() calls when available.

When compression is enabled with xtrabackup all data is compressed, including the transaction log file and meta data files, using the specified compression algorithm. Read more about supported compression algorithms in the Create a compressed backup document.