Is it possible to use mariabackup to backup a 10.3 db and restore it to a 10.6 db?

Question

I have successfully backed up a 10.3 mariadb database from PC A (ubuntu 20.04).

On PC B (Ubuntu 22.04), i tried to restore it to a brand new freshly installed 10.6 mariadb.

When preparing the restoration ( mariabackup --prepare --target-dir=/my_nfs_share/ ), i receive the following error :

[ERROR] InnoDB: Upgrade after a crash is not supported. The redo log was created with Backup 
10.3.38-MariaDB. You must start up and shut down MariaDB 10.4 or earlier on the data directory.

Onto another brand new pc (Ubuntu 20.04 , same 10.3 Mariadb Version, freshly installed), everything is running smoothly.

I concluded that when restoring a mariadb database with mariabackup, I must have the exact same mariadb database version on both the source and target servers.

Can someone guide me on this ? Should i use mariadb-dump instead ?

Regards, Pierre

Answer 1

The prepare step must be applied from the same MariaDB (major.minor) version that took the backup.

Perform the same step using MariaDB-10.3:

mariabackup --prepare --target-dir=/my_nfs_share/

After that it will be possible to restore that to any later version.

Run mariadb-upgrade on the later version after it starts up.