Backup and Restore


This document describes how to back up and restore the data of TiDB. Currently, this document only covers full backup and restoration.

Here we assume that the TiDB service information is as follows:

Name Address Port User Password
TiDB 4000 root *

Use the following tools for data backup and restoration:

  • mydumper: to export data from TiDB
  • loader: to import data into TiDB

Download TiDB toolset (Linux)

# Download the tool package.

# Check the file integrity. If the result is OK, the file is correct.
sha256sum -c tidb-enterprise-tools-latest-linux-amd64.sha256

# Extract the package.
tar -xzf tidb-enterprise-tools-latest-linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd tidb-enterprise-tools-latest-linux-amd64

Full backup and restoration using mydumper/loader

You can use mydumper to export data from MySQL and loader to import the data into TiDB.

Important: You must use the mydumper from the Enterprise Tools package, and not the mydumper provided by your operating system's package manager. The upstream version of mydumper does not yet handle TiDB correctly (#155). Using mysqldump is also not recommended, as it is much slower for both backup and restoration.

Best practices of full backup and restoration using mydumper/loader

To quickly backup and restore data (especially large amounts of data), refer to the following recommendations:

  • Keep the exported data file as small as possible and it is recommended keep it within 64M. You can use the -F parameter to set the value.
  • You can adjust the -t parameter of loader based on the number and the load of TiKV instances. For example, if there are three TiKV instances, -t can be set to 3 * (1 ~ n). If the load of TiKV is too high and the log backoffer.maxSleep 15000ms is exceeded is displayed many times, decrease the value of -t; otherwise, increase it.
  • The total size of the exported files is 214G. A single table has 8 columns and 2 billion rows.
  • The cluster topology:
    • 12 TiKV instances: 4 nodes, 3 TiKV instances per node
    • 4 TiDB instances
    • 3 PD instances
  • The configuration of each node:
    • CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 v3 @ 2.30GHz
    • 48 vCPU [2 x 12 physical cores]
    • Memory: 128G
    • Disk: sda [raid 10, 300G] sdb[RAID 5, 2T]
    • Operating System: CentOS 7.3
  • The -F parameter of mydumper is set to 16 and the -t parameter of loader is set to 64.

Results: It takes 11 hours to import all the data, which is 19.4G/hour.

Backup data from TiDB

Use mydumper to backup data from TiDB.

./bin/mydumper -h -P 4000 -u root -t 16 -F 64 -B test -T t1,t2 --skip-tz-utc -o ./var/test

In this command,

  • -B test: means the data is exported from the test database.
  • -T t1,t2: means only the t1 and t2 tables are exported.
  • -t 16: means 16 threads are used to export the data.
  • -F 64: means a table is partitioned into chunks and one chunk is 64MB.
  • --skip-tz-utc: the purpose of adding this parameter is to ignore the inconsistency of time zone setting between MySQL and the data exporting machine and to disable automatic conversion.

Restore data into TiDB

To restore data into TiDB, use loader to import the previously exported data. See Loader instructions for more information.

./bin/loader -h -u root -P 4000 -t 32 -d ./var/test

After the data is imported, you can view the data in TiDB using the MySQL client:

mysql -h127.0.0.1 -P4000 -uroot

mysql> show tables;
| Tables_in_test |
| t1             |
| t2             |

mysql> select * from t1;
| id | age  |
|  1 |    1 |
|  2 |    2 |
|  3 |    3 |

mysql> select * from t2;
| id | name |
|  1 | a    |
|  2 | b    |
|  3 | c    |