is it possible to get innobackupex to print the filenames it's busy with?

Question

I am getting crashes when trying to run innobackupex --apply-log. How can I find out what files it's processing at the time? I don't see a relevant option mentioned in the documentation.

Answer 1

Check the version you used to backup the data is the same as the one you are trying to use to restore. This can bite.

Answer 2

One easy way to do this would be by using strace, for example:

$ strace -e trace=open xtrabackup --prepare --target-dir=2014-11-27_06-06-49

Change 2014-11-27_06-06-49 for the path to your unprepared backup location. I'm using here xtrabackup as it is the lower level tool that innobackupex uses internally.

A poor man's replacement would be to do a polling, with something like this on a different session:

$ while true; do lsof +D ./2014-11-27_06-06-49 ; sleep 0.1; done

Again, change ./2014-11-27_06-06-49 for your backup location and adjust the sleep time if convenient.