To take a backup, run the following command: $ mariabackup -backup \ When taking a full backup, the target directory must be empty or it must not exist. In order to back up the database, you need to run Mariabackup with the -backup option to tell it to perform a backup and with the -target-dir option to tell it where to place the backup files.
This page documents how to perform full backups. Full backups create a complete backup of the database server in an empty directory while incremental backups update a previous backup with whatever changes to the data have occurred since the backup. When using Mariabackup, you have the option of performing a full or an incremental backup.