Group Replication initiates and manages cloning operations for distributed recovery. Group members that have been set up to support cloning may also participate in cloning operations that a user initiates manually. For example, you might want to create a new server instance by cloning from a group member as the donor, but you do not want the new server instance to join the group immediately, or maybe not ever.

In all releases that support cloning, you can initiate a cloning operation manually involving a group member on which Group Replication is stopped. Note that because cloning requires that the active plugins on a donor and recipient must match, the Group Replication plugin must be installed and active on the other server instance, even if you do not intend that server instance to join a group. You can install the plugin by issuing this statement:

INSTALL PLUGIN group_replication SONAME 'group_replication.so';

In releases before MySQL 8.0.20, you cannot initiate a cloning operation manually if the operation involves a group member on which Group Replication is running. From MySQL 8.0.20, you can do this, provided that the cloning operation does not remove and replace the data on the recipient. The statement to initiate the cloning operation must therefore include the DATA DIRECTORY clause if Group Replication is running.