Restoring to a specific moment.
WHAT IT MEANS
Restoring a backup, then replaying changes up to a chosen point.
WHY IT MATTERS
A daily backup means losing up to a day; point-in-time reduces that to minutes.
WHAT IT REQUIRES
A base backup A continuous record of changes since
WHAT THAT RECORD IS CALLED
The binary log, in MySQL and MariaDB.
WHAT IT CONTAINS
Every change, in order.
WHAT TO CONFIGURE
That logging is enabled Where the logs are written How long they are retained
WHY RETENTION MATTERS
Logs must cover the period from your oldest usable backup.
WHAT THE PROCESS IS
Restore the base backup Replay the logs from that point Stop at the chosen moment
WHAT THE CHOSEN MOMENT USUALLY IS
Immediately before a mistaken statement.
WHY THAT IS THE PRINCIPAL USE
Recovering from a wrong update or delete, rather than hardware failure.
HOW TO FIND THE POSITION
Examine the log for the offending statement.
WHAT TO PRACTISE
The whole procedure, before needing it.
WHY
It has several steps, and each is easy to get wrong under pressure.
WHAT TO STORE LOGS ON
Different storage from the data.
