Backing Up and Restoring the Database
Creating regular database backups is an important part of basic maintenance tasks at your site. Vertica supplies a comprehensive utility, called vbr, for this purpose. This utility lets you perform the following operations. Unless otherwise noted, operations are supported in both Enterprise Mode and Eon Mode:
- Back up a database (full or incremental backup).
- Back up specific objects (schemas or tables) in a database (Enterprise Mode only).
- Restore a database or individual objects from backup. (Object restore is Enterprise Mode only.)
- Copy a database to another cluster (for example, to promote a test cluster to production) (Enterprise Mode only).
- Replicate individual objects (schemas or tables) to another cluster (Enterprise Mode only).
- List available backups.
Using vbr, you can save your data to a variety of locations:
- A local directory on the nodes in the cluster
- One or more hosts outside of the cluster
- A different Vertica cluster (effectively cloning your database)
- Amazon S3 storage
When backing up an Eon Mode database, you must use a location on S3.
You cannot back up an Enterprise Mode database and restore it in Eon Mode or vice versa.
Impact of Backups on Vertica Nodes
While a backup is taking place, the backup process can consume additional storage. The amount of space consumed depends on the size of your catalog and any objects that you drop during the backup. The backup process releases this storage once the backup is complete.
Compatibility Requirements for Restore
Creating backups with vbr requires restoring backups with the same utility. Vertica 6.x and later supports object-level backups.
Restoring must be done on the same architecture as the backup from which you are restoring. You cannot back up an Enterprise Mode database and restore it to an Eon Mode database or vice versa.
Additional Considerations for HDFS Storage Locations
If your database has any storage locations on HDFS, you must do additional configuration to enable those storage locations to be backed up. See Backing Up HDFS Storage Locations in Integrating with Apache Hadoop.
Supported File Systems
Vertica supports the following file systems for backup and temporary directory locations:
- ext3
- ext4
- NFS
- Amazon S3 Standard
The file system at your backup and temporary directory locations must support fcntl lockf (POSIX) file locking.
