# Database Backup Recovery

By

Travis Horn

• The database is MariaDB
• mariadb-backup is installed
• You have a compressed backup file containing the state of the database to which you want to recover

Before continuing with data recovery, I highly recommend creating a manual backup, in case you need to revert back to the state before recovery started.

Create a directory for storing the recovered files temporarily. It can be named anything you like. Here it is named recovered.

sudo mkdir /var/mariadb/backup/recovered

Unzip the compressed database backup in the directory.

sudo gunzip -c /var/mariadb/backup/backup_20230430T031458Z.gz | sudo mbstream -x --directory=/var/mariadb/backup/recovered

Prepare the recovery files. This is necessary because files created at backup time are not point-in-time consistent and MariaDB will reject the recovery if not properly prepared.

sudo mariabackup --prepare --target-dir=/var/mariadb/backup/recovered

Stop MariaDB.

sudo systemctl stop mariadb

Remove all existing data files.

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql

Restore the backup files.

sudo mariabackup --copy-back --target-dir=/var/mariadb/backup/recovered

Change ownership of the newly recovered files so that the mysql user can access them properly.

sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql

Start MariaDB.

sudo systemctl start mariadb

The database is now restored back to the state it was in when the backup was taken.

Remove the recovery files as they are no longer needed.

sudo rm -rf /var/mariadb/backup/recovered