Incremental backups: MySQL Enterprise Backup vs Percona XtraBackup?
ZFS beats both by light years with snapshots and incremental transfers and transparent compression.
ZFS snapshots can be transferred incrementally. You only transfer the blocks that have changed between the two snapshots. And you get lz4 compression on everything for close to free, and the snapshot sending doesn't have to decompress and recompress.
It is guaranteed to be consistent. ZFS being copy-on-write, either the entire transaction sticks, or the entire transaction is lost, nothing in-between. Unless, of course, you disabled safeties at database level, in which case all bets are off anyway. - gordan-bobic