MySQL 5.7 database files

[Vaughan Wickham]

Hello,

My experience with database applications has been with SQL Server, which I've always found has two files in the filesystem for a database (MDF & LDF)

I'm working with an application that uses MySQL 5.7 and the database folder has many files which seem to be replaced daily (a new copy of each file is being created).

This is leading to the backups being larger than I'd like and I'm just wondering if the way this database is currently configured is standard practice or not.

I've done a bit of searching on MySQL indexing and not found anything useful so far, so was hoping I might be able to get some direction here on what I could check for.

Ideally I want to establish how indexing is currently configured and whether this process of creating new copies of all the tables (?) is standard practice for MySQL

Thanks

VW