Can the backups generated by TiDB's physical backup tool BR be restored to other TiDB clusters?

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This topic has been translated from a Chinese forum by GPT and might contain errors.

Original topic: tidb的物理备份工具BR产生的备份可以恢复到其他的tidb集群中吗？

| username: ablewang_xiaobo

【TiDB Usage Environment】Production\Testing Environment
【TiDB Version】v4.0.9
【Problem Encountered】Can the backup created by TiDB’s backup tool BR be restored to another TiDB cluster?
【Reproduction Path】
【Problem Phenomenon and Impact】

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| username: ablewang_xiaobo | Original post link

The configuration of my other environment is different from the original environment. The number of machines and the size of resources are also different.

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| username: ddhe9527 | Original post link

Sure, BR just backed up some SST files.

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| username: Kongdom | Original post link

What I understand is that it can be restored, after all, BR is a physical backup.

Here are the usage limitations listed.

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| username: cs58_dba | Original post link

This is somewhat like MySQL’s xtrabackup, it can restore, but there are still limitations.

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| username: 啦啦啦啦啦 | Original post link

Definitely, otherwise backups would be useless. If the original machines are all down, you need to restore to a new cluster, and it must be an empty cluster.

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| username: 长安是只喵 | Original post link

As the experts have mentioned, this can indeed be restored to other TiDB clusters. However, if it is a multi-node setup, the backup needs to be mounted on each node.

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| username: h5n1 | Original post link

Cross-machine recovery is an essential capability for physical backups.

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| username: cs58_dba | Original post link

Try mounting with NFS.

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| username: ablewang_xiaobo | Original post link

Thank you, everyone.