A wrapper round Percona's Xtrabackup script:
https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-xtrabackup
this is meant to be cronned and used to produce a series of copies of the db to be kept as backups.
Stick something like this in your crontab:
0 2 1 * * * mysql-xtrabackup --defaults-file ~/backups.my.cnf --label monthly --max-days 95
and keep about three month's worth of monthly archives of your DB, stored named something like this:
/home/mysql-xtrabackup/monthly/2018-01-01_02.00.01_fri-mysql-xtrabackup.tar.gz
/home/mysql-xtrabackup/monthly/2018-02-01_02.00.01_fri-mysql-xtrabackup.tar.gz
/home/mysql-xtrabackup/monthly/2018-03-01_02.00.01_fri-mysql-xtrabackup.tar.gz
/home/mysql-xtrabackup/monthly/2018-04-01_02.00.01_fri-mysql-xtrabackup.tar.gz
And each of these is just a gzipped tarball of the /var/lib/mysql directory
that innobackupex produced. See the --help output (or ./help.txt) for an
explanation of what the labels mean.
Logfiles are written so as to be self-rotating; the above backups will have produced these logfiles:
/var/log/mysql-xtrabackup/jan-monthly
/var/log/mysql-xtrabackup/feb-monthly
/var/log/mysql-xtrabackup/mar-monthly
/var/log/mysql-xtrabackup/apr-monthly
so you'll only ever have 12 of them, and can always inspect the last file to
get the status of the last backup (see my check_log project for how I do that
in icinga).