Is the backup cycle of Azure MySQL Flexible Server's binary logs real-time?

Question

Hi. I checked this page. - https://learn.microsoft.com/ko-kr/azure/mysql/single-server/concepts-backup For a single server, the transaction log (bin log) was backed up every 5 minutes. However, According to the contents of this page, it is possible to restore the latest restore point in the case of a flexible server. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/mysql/flexible-server/concepts-backup-restore In fact, when I checked my flexible server, I found that the latest recovery time was real time. For flexible servers, is the binlog backup cycle real-time?

Answer 1

Hi
안예리 •,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum and thanks for using Azure services.

As I understand, you want to know about backup cycle of Azure MySQL Flexible Server binary logs. Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server supports two types of backups to provide an enhanced flexibility towards maintaining backups of the business-critical data.

Automated backup

Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server takes snapshot backups of the data files and stores them in a local redundant storage. The server also performs transaction logs backup and also stores them in local redundant storage. These backups allow you to restore a server to any point-in-time within your configured backup retention period. The default backup retention period is seven days. You can optionally configure the database backup from 1 to 35 days. All backups are encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption for the data stored at rest.

On-Demand backup

Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server also allows you to trigger on-demand backups of the production workload, in addition to the automated backups taken by the service and store it in alignment with server’s backup retention policy. You can use these backups as a fastest restore point to perform a point-in-time restore to reduce restore times by up to 90%. The default backup retention period is seven days. You can optionally configure the database backup from 1 to 35 days. You can trigger a total of 50 on-demand backups from the portal. All backups are encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption for the data stored at rest.

Backup frequency

Backups on flexible servers are snapshot-based. The first snapshot backup is scheduled immediately after a server is created. Snapshot backups are taken daily once. Transaction log backups occur every five minutes. If a scheduled backup fails, our backup service tries every 20 minutes to take a backup until a successful backup is taken. These backup failures may occur due to heavy transactional production loads on the server instance.

Refer to Accessing binary logs from Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server for details on Binlogs.

As mentioned, you found that the latest recovery time was real time. Could you please elaborate more on the statement.

Backup Frequency would be every 5 minutes for transaction logs which would appear to be real time.

Backups are online operations and are snapshot-based. The snapshot operation only takes few seconds and doesn’t interfere with production workloads ensuring high availability of the server.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have more queries.

Thanks