I currently have backups that were taken with Percona XtraBackup of all my mySQL databases.
My specific scenario is that I want to restore a month old InnoDB database snapshot to my local machine for testing but I can't seem to find instructions for doing that in the Percona documentation.
Reading around on Google I come to the conclusion that I have to extract the tar.gz file on my machine and "replay" the transaction log but the log is on the remote machine.
So my question is what specific steps are needed and what are the caveats for restoring the DB snapshot to my machine.
Finally it seems that using XtraBackup by itself doesn't guarantee that you will be able to restore your data if something goes wrong. For example if the server was to die the backups I have would be useless without the transaction log. So a general phrasing of my question might be what steps need to be taken to ensure that I can restore my data on any machine I wish.
Please keep in mind that my main area of expertise is not server management!