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 back up, restore, list backups, and copy your database to another cluster. You can create full and incremental database backups, and backups of schemas or tables (object-level backups) for use with a multi-tenanted database. When a full backup exists, you can restore one or more objects from the backup or the entire database, as required.

Using vbr, you can save your data to a variety of locations:

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 and Replication

Creating backups with vbr requires restoring backups with the same utility. Vertica 6.x and later supports object-level backups.

Vertica supports restore, replication, and copycluster actions only to the same exact version of Vertica that created the backup. For example, you cannot restore, replicate objects, or copycluster a version 7.0.2-3 backup to a version 7.0.2-5 database.

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:

The file system at your backup and temporary directory locations must support fcntl lockf (POSIX) file locking. Backups to Amazon S3 use a secondary location to handle file locking.

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