Restoring Logical Backups

If you’re restoring logical backups instead of raw files, you need to use the MySQL server itself to load the data back into the tables, as opposed to using the operating system to simply copy files into place.

Before you load that dump file, however, take a moment to consider how large it is, how long it’ll take to load, and anything you might want to do before you start, such as notifying your users or disabling part of your application. Disabling binary logging might be a good idea, unless you need to replicate the restoration to a replica: a huge dump file is hard enough for the server to load, and writing it to the binary log adds even more (possibly unnecessary) overhead. Loading huge files also has consequences for some storage engines. For example, it’s not a good idea to load 100 GB of data into InnoDB in a single transaction, because of the huge rollback segment that will result. You....