When designing you backup strategy which involves using XtraBackup, it is often part of the job to be able to rotate backups not to fill the disks and not be able to take further backups. However, sometimes I’ve seen people how they can do this when XtraBackup creates its own timestamped directory (by default). Well, here’s two.

1. After the backup, find the latest backup set on the backup directory using bash or whichever scripting language you are using, by default the resulting directory for new backup sets takes this sample format ’2010-03-13_02-42-44′. Below is how you can achieve this with bash

CB=$(ls -1 | egrep '^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}_[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}$' | sort -n | head -n 1)

2. Use the –no-timestamp option of innobackupex to control the backup directories.

--no-timestamp
This option prevents creation of a time-stamped subdirectory of the
BACKUP-ROOT-DIR given on the command line. When it is specified, the
backup is done in BACKUP-ROOT-DIR instead.

With this method, you will have to create the unique backup directories from your script, which in turn you would already know the resulting name you can use for prepare. You can easily generate one based on current date with the sample bash command below:

CURDATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

This is only one essential part of a good backup procedure, I might blog on more.