Xtrabackup is the best solution to create backups for several reasons:
It's fast in creating a backup
It's fast in restoring a backup
It locks a table for a very short time
It can stream compressed databases
It can perform incremental backups
It allows you to compress your backups
It allows you to encrypt your backups
In most cases, it's a better solution to backup, as it is very fast and doesn't need to lock the tables for a long time (only a few milliseconds). However, you need to take care about what you're backing up, as Xtrabackup only backs up InnoDB/XtraDB and MyISAM engines.
To install Xtrabackup, we saw in the previous chapters that you need to first configure the Percona repository and then install Xtrabackup.