When using InnoDB‘s Hot Backup code to take a snapshot of your production database and use that snapshot to populate a new slave you may run into an error about not being able to drop the ibbackup_binlog_marker table and all replication bombs out.

The problem is that the innobackup tool deletes the temporary table ibbackup_binlog_marker but the .frm file does not get removed, so your new slave sees the ibbackup_binlog_marker.frm and thinks the table should exist, but the binary log says you are trying to replay says it’s already been deleted; the result is an inconsistent state that causes MySQL replication to fail.

The solution is to remove the ibbackup_binlog_marker.frm file in the mysql data directory; after that is done, then slave replication should continue as expected.