Incremental or Repeated Backups

Vertica recommends, as a best practice, that you take frequent backups if database contents diverge in significant ways. Always take backups after any event that significantly modifies the database, such as performing a rebalance. Mixing many backups with significant differences can weaken data K-safety. For example, taking backups both before and after a rebalance is not a recommended practice in cases where the backups are all part of one archive.

Each time you back up your database with the same configuration file, vbr creates an additional backup and might remove the oldest backup. The backup operation copies new storage containers, which can include:

• Data that existed the last time you performed a database backup
• New and changed data since the last full backup

Use the restorePointLimit parameter in the configuration file to increase the number of stored backups. If a backup task would cause this limit to be exceeded, vbr deletes the oldest backup after a successful backup.

When you run a backup task, vbr first creates the new backup in the specified location, which might temporarily exceed the limit. It then checks whether the number of backups exceeds the value of restorePointLimit, and, if necessary, deletes the oldest backups until only restorePointLimit remain. If the requested backup fails or is interrupted, vbr does not delete any backups.

When you restore a database, you can choose to restore from any retained backup rather than the most recent, so raise the limit if you expect to need access to older backups.