compressed backups cannot be restored without an external utility (qpress)

[Ryan Lowe]

If I create a backup with --compress, there is no way for me to uncompress that backup without an (uncommon) external utility.

See http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/howtos/recipes_ibkx_compressed.html

I would love to see some sort of built-in --uncompress option so I could do something like:

%> innobackupex --compress /data/backup

and then

%> innobackupex --uncompress --apply-log /data/backup/2012-06-01_11-24-04/

[Alexey Kopytov (akopytov)]

Yes, it's been discussed a number of times, but not filed anywhere. We are going to package qpress in Percona repositories (and make xtrabackup packages depend on it).

Note that we have the manual uncompress procedure documented at http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/howtos/recipes_ibkx_compressed.html

[Ryan Lowe (ryan-a-lowe)]

If somebody were interested in sponsorship, how many hours of work are we estimating for this?

[Ryan Lowe (ryan-a-lowe)]

*bump*

[Andreas Stieger (andreasstieger)]

I do not see how this a bug for xtrabackup. Qpress can be trivially built, and I have added this to my preferred distribution as a standard package. An third-party package publisher should not be concerned with supplying every single item.

On that note, I found the compressio ratio (not the compression speed) of qpress to fall below what I require. I prefer streaming backups using xbstream and then using my own compression, or offline compression from a disk cache. Here, pixz is my current preference favouring very good compression ratios with the ability to use all CPUs in the system.

The is a good chance you are running to RHEL/CentOS. So as a courtesy for your friendly openSUSE packager your will qpress package (and pixz, for that matter) in the repositories below.
http://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3AAndreasStieger%3Abranches%3AArchiving&package=qpress
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/AndreasStieger:/branches:/Archiving/

[Andreas Stieger (andreasstieger)]

Also qpress is available in the Percona repositories.

[Shahriyar Rzayev (rzayev-sehriyar)]

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PXB-630