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|Percona XtraBackup| 2.1.0-alpha1
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Percona is glad to announce the release of |Percona XtraBackup| 2.1.0-alpha1 on April 2nd 2013. Downloads are available from our download site `here <http://www.percona.com/downloads/XtraBackup/2.1.0/>`_. For this ALPHA release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages

This is an *ALPHA* quality release and is not intended for production. If you want a high quality, Generally Available release, the current Stable version should be used (currently 2.0.6 in the 2.0 series at the time of writing).

This release contains all of the features and bug fixes in :doc:`Percona XtraBackup 2.0.6 </release-notes/2.0/2.0.6>`, plus the following:

New features
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 |Percona XtraBackup| now has support for :ref:`compact_backups_ibk`. This feature can be used for taking the backups that will take less amount of disk space.

 |Percona XtraBackup| has implemented :ref:`encrypted_backups_ibk`. This feature can be used to encrypt/decrypt both local and streamed backups in order to add another layer of protection to the backups.

 |innobackupex| now uses Perl's ``DBD::MySQL`` package for server communication instead of spawning the mysql command line client.

 Support for |InnoDB| 5.0 and |InnoDB| 5.1 builtin has been removed from |Percona XtraBackup|.

 After being deprecated in previous version, option :option:`--remote-host` has been completely removed in |Percona XtraBackup| 2.1.

Bugs Fixed
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 |innobackupex| now supports empty arguments in the :option:`--password` option. Bug fixed :bug:`1032667` (*Andrew Gaul*).
