Comment 0 for bug 824824

This issue was observed in version 1.6.0 and 1.6.2 too. Whenever the incremental backup ran for less than 30 minutes, the backup completed successfully. Once the incremental ran for extended periods of time, it failed with the following error just as it enters to copy the MyISAM tables.

20110726_225312.log-110727 00:56:10 innobackupex: Starting to backup .frm, .MRG, .MYD, .MYI,
20110726_225312.log-innobackupex: .TRG, .TRN, .ARM, .ARZ, .CSM, .CSV and .opt files in
20110726_225312.log-innobackupex: subdirectories of '/var/lib/mysql'
20110726_225312.log:innobackupex: Error: Broken pipe at /var/backups/xtrabackup/bin/innobackupex line 336.
20110726_225312.log-Backup failed.
20110726_225312.log-Deleting bad data directory...
20110726_225312.log-Done. Removed /ddmysql/backups/20110726_225312

We were able to find a work around for this issue.

mysql_keep_alive_timeout in innobackpex file was changed from the default 1800 to a much larger value and the backups started completing successfully. Looks like the script loses the connection handle during the course of run and when it tries to send a ping to the server it results in a broken pipe.