The ibbackup command is available on all platforms, with the same options as before plus some new ones. In particular, the --incremental option enables incremental backups of InnoDB tables.

The mysqlbackup command, a cross-platform replacement for the innobackup command, is now available on Windows. Windows users can back up MyISAM tables and tables from other storage engines besides InnoDB, without writing their own wrapper script for the ibbackup command.

The mysqlbackup command is a C program connecting to the server through the MySQL API, rather than a Perl script that runs the mysql command. Because it does not run the actual mysql command, it does not support the --mysql-extra-args option of innobackup, but otherwise the syntax is compatible.

This documentation refers to the mysqlbackup command exclusively.

If this implementation change presents any issues for former users of the InnoDB Hot Backup product (for example, if you customized the innobackup script or relied on specific mysqld options passed through the --mysql-extra-args option), please submit requirements against the new mysqlbackup command.

Currently, the old innobackup Perl script is still supplied on Linux and Unix systems, for troubleshooting in case of upgrade issues as you transition to the mysqlbackup command.

Backups produced by the InnoDB Hot Backup product can be restored by the MySQL Enterprise Backup product.

The incremental backup feature is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup.

Support for the Barracuda file format is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup.

The MySQL Enterprise Backup product includes some new performance optimizations, such as the posix_fadvise() system call.

A new logging capability records the progress of running backup jobs, and historical details for completed backup jobs. For details, see Section 9.3, “Using the MySQL Enterprise Backup Backup Logs”.

The mysqlbackup command has extra flexibility for specifying the MySQL connection information. It can read the user, password, port and socket options from the [client] group of your default or user-specified configuration file. If you supply the --password option without an argument, you are prompted to enter the password interactively.