Percona: Do I need apply-log switch for a weekly full backup and hourly incremental? I am planning a script to work on our percona. Our strategy is to do full backup weekly but incremental backups every day/hour. I have read innobackupex manual and got confused further as to whether I really need it or no.  

A post here on dba.stackexchange.com , to my understanding suggests that I do NOT need this if I am also doing the incremental backup. This was also confirmed on a percona forum

To be on the safer side this is how I planned to achieve this:

#first day of the week
innobackupex --user=myuser --password=mypassword /path/to/backup/dir

#Every day/hour 
innobackupex --incremental .... ... ... 


I hope I got it right, if not kindly advise.

Thank you
You do not need apply-log for the backup, but you need it for the restore. Depending if you perform differential or incremental backups, you will need to execute one apply-log for rolling forward the backup and application of the changes since the last full or incremental backup. --apply-log --redo-only --incremental-dir

Whether you perform that after the backup or before the restore is entirely up to you and your backup policy. Some people prefer to have a ready-to-copy-back rolling-forward full backup, so they execute the --apply-log just after the backup. Others do the whole process just in case of the restore is needed. Both approaches have different properties in mean time to recovery, detection of faulty backups, space needed, time to perform the backup, etc.

Think on your recovery policy (not your backup strategy) and make the tool suit to it, not the other way round.

More info: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/innobackupex/incremental_backups_innobackupex.html