At a glance
| DumpCat | Percona XtraBackup | |
|---|---|---|
| Price and license | Free and open source (Apache-2.0). No account, no license key. | Free and open source (GPL). |
| How it runs | Self-hosted: one binary with a web UI, running as a systemd or Windows service next to your database. | A command-line tool you call from your own scripts or cron. |
| Platforms | Linux (amd64, arm64) and Windows (64-bit). | Linux (packages, tarballs, Docker). |
| Databases | MySQL 5.7, 8.0, 8.4, Percona Server, MariaDB 10.x and 11.x. | MySQL and Percona Server. MariaDB does not support XtraBackup and recommends MariaBackup instead. |
| Backup methods | Logical with mysqldump / mariadb-dump or parallel mydumper; hot physical backups with XtraBackup / MariaBackup, including incrementals. No locks on InnoDB. | Hot physical backups with incrementals (including page tracking); backup locks instead of a global read lock for non-InnoDB data. |
| Point-in-time recovery | Yes. Continuous binlog archiving; restore to a timestamp, a binlog position or just before a GTID. | Manual: replay binlogs with mysqlbinlog. XtraBackup does not archive binlogs itself. |
| Storage | Local disk / NFS, S3 and compatibles, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, FTP / FTPS, WebDAV, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, Dropbox and every rclone backend; several per job. | Local files or an xbstream stream; xbcloud uploads to S3, MinIO, Google Cloud Storage, Azure and Swift. |
| Encryption | age encryption on your server before anything is uploaded; zstd compression; SHA-256 for every file. | zstd (default) or lz4 compression; AES-256 with --encrypt. |
| Scheduling and retention | Cron-style schedules; retention per storage by count, age or GFS (daily / weekly / monthly). | None built in: no scheduler, retention or rotation. |
| Restore | From the web UI: restore under a new database name, test-decrypt every file before dropping anything, integrity checks after each run. | By hand: prepare the backup, apply incrementals, then copy-back with the server stopped. |
| Where your data goes | Straight from your server to the storage you choose. Nothing passes through a third party. | Wherever your scripts send it. |
| Notifications | Email, Telegram, Slack, Discord and HMAC-signed webhooks. | None built in. |
Choose Percona XtraBackup if
- You already have reliable scripts, monitoring and runbooks around XtraBackup and only need the engine.
- You need an XtraBackup option that DumpCat does not expose, or a fully custom pipeline.
Choose DumpCat if
- You want XtraBackup and MariaBackup scheduled from a web UI, with full + incremental chains and retention handled for you.
- You want binlogs archived continuously, so a physical backup plus binlogs restores to any second.
- You want age encryption, uploads to S3, Google Drive, SFTP and more, and alerts when something fails.
- You want restores that download the full + incremental chain, prepare it and can replace the datadir for you, rolling back automatically if any step fails.
Switching from Percona XtraBackup
- Install DumpCat on the database server; the Linux installer installs the XtraBackup or MariaBackup version that matches your server.
- Create a job with the physical method, a full schedule and an incremental schedule.
- Turn on binlog archiving for point-in-time recovery, run the job once, then retire your cron scripts.
Sources
Facts about Percona XtraBackup were checked on October 18, 2026 against the sources below. Products change: if something here is out of date, please open an issue on GitHub.
- Percona XtraBackup 8.4 documentation
- Percona XtraBackup: point-in-time recovery
- MariaDB: backup and restore overview
Percona XtraBackup is a trademark of its owner. DumpCat is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with it.