Replication as a Backup Solution

Replication can be used to support the backup strategy.

Replication alone is not sufficient for backup. It assists in protecting against hardware failure on the primary server, but does not protect against data loss. An accidental or malicious DROP DATABASE or TRUNCATE TABLE statement will be replicated onto the replica as well. Care needs to be taken to prevent data getting out of sync between the primary and the replica.

The terms master and slave have historically been used in replication, and MariaDB has begun the process of adding primary and replica synonyms. The old terms will continue to be used to maintain backward compatibility - see MDEV-18777 to follow progress on this effort.

Replication is most commonly used to support backups as follows:

A primary server replicates to a replica
Backups are then run off the replica without any impact on the primary.

Backups can have a significant effect on a server, and a high-availability primary may not be able to be stopped, locked or simply handle the extra load of a backup. Running the backup from a replica has the advantage of being able to shutdown or lock the replica and perform a backup without any impact on the primary server.

Note that when backing up off a replica server, it is important to ensure that the servers keep the data in sync. See for example Replication and Foreign Keys for a situation when identical statements can result in different data on a replica and a primary.

See Also