Copying the tablespace file (the .ibd
file) is the fastest way of moving data around, rather than exporting and importing through mysqldump
or mydumper
. The data is available immediately rather than having to be reinserted and the indexes rebuilt. There are many reasons why you might copy an InnoDB
file-per-table tablespace to a different instance:
- To run reports without putting extra load on a production server
- To set up identical data for a table on a new slave server
- To restore a backed-up version of a table or partition after a problem or mistake
- To have busy tables on an SSD device, or large tables on a high-capacity HDD device