Backing Up and Restoring the Database

Creating regular database backups is an important part of basic maintenance tasks. Vertica supplies a comprehensive utility, vbr, for this purpose. vbr lets you perform the following operations. Unless otherwise noted, operations are supported in both Enterprise Mode and Eon Mode:

  • Back up a database.
  • Back up specific objects (schemas or tables) in a database (Enterprise Mode only).
  • Restore a database or individual objects from backup.
  • 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.

When you run vbr you specify a configuration (.ini) file. In this file you specify all of the configuration parameters for the operation -- what to back up, where to back it up, how many backups to keep, whether to encrypt transmissions, and much more. Vertica provides several Sample VBR .ini Files that you can use as templates.

You can use vbr to restore a backup created by vbr. Typically you use the same configuration file for both operations.

When doing a backup you can save your data to a local directory on each node, a remote file system, a different Vertica cluster (effectively cloning your database), or S3. If you are backing up an Eon Mode database you must use S3.

You cannot back up an Enterprise Mode database and restore it in Eon Mode or vice versa.

Common Use Cases introduces the most common vbr operations.

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.

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