Take Full and Incremental Backups

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Because CockroachDB is designed with high fault tolerance, backups are primarily needed for disaster recovery (i.e., if your cluster loses a majority of its nodes). Isolated issues (such as small-scale node outages) do not require any intervention. However, as an operational best practice, we recommend taking regular backups of your data.

There are two main types of backups:

• Full backups
• Incremental backups

Perform backup and restore

You can use the BACKUP statement to efficiently back up your cluster's schemas and data to popular cloud services such as AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or NFS, and the RESTORE statement to efficiently restore schema and data as necessary. For more information, see Use Cloud Storage for Bulk Operations.

Full backups

New in v20.2: Full backups are now available to both core and Enterprise users.

In most cases, it's recommended to take full nightly backups of your cluster. A cluster backup allows you to do the following:

• Restore table(s) from the cluster
• Restore database(s) from the cluster
• Restore a full cluster

To do a cluster backup, use the BACKUP statement:

> BACKUP TO '<backup_location>';

If it's ever necessary, you can use the RESTORE statement to restore a table:

> RESTORE TABLE bank.customers FROM '<backup_location>';

Or to restore a database:

> RESTORE DATABASE bank FROM '<backup_location>';

Or to restore your full cluster:

> RESTORE FROM '<backup_location>';

Incremental backups

If your cluster grows too large for nightly full backups, you can take less frequent full backups (e.g., weekly) with nightly incremental backups. Incremental backups are storage efficient and faster than full backups for larger clusters.

Periodically run the BACKUP command to take a full backup of your cluster:

> BACKUP TO '<backup_location>';

Then, create nightly incremental backups based off of the full backups you've already created. If you backup to a destination already containing a full backup, an incremental backup will be appended to the full backup in a subdirectory:

> BACKUP TO '<backup_location>';

If it's ever necessary, you can then use the RESTORE command to restore your cluster, database(s), and/or table(s). Restoring from incremental backups requires previous full and incremental backups. To restore from a destination containing the full backup, as well as the automatically appended incremental backups (that are stored as subdirectories, like in the example above):

> RESTORE FROM '<backup_location>';

Incremental backups with explicitly specified destinations

To explicitly control where your incremental backups go, use the INCREMENTAL FROM syntax:

> BACKUP DATABASE bank \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/db/bank/2017-03-29-nightly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s' \
INCREMENTAL FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly', 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-28-nightly' WITH revision_history;

Examples

Automated full backups

Both core and Enterprise users can use backup scheduling for full backups of clusters, databases, or tables. To create schedules that only take full backups, included the FULL BACKUP ALWAYS clause. For example, to create a schedule for taking full cluster backups:

> CREATE SCHEDULE core_schedule_label
  FOR BACKUP INTO 's3://test/schedule-test-core?AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=x&AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=x'
    RECURRING '@daily'
    FULL BACKUP ALWAYS
    WITH SCHEDULE OPTIONS first_run = 'now';

     schedule_id     |        name         | status |         first_run         | schedule |                                                                                       backup_stmt
---------------------+---------------------+--------+---------------------------+----------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  588799238330220545 | core_schedule_label | ACTIVE | 2020-09-11 00:00:00+00:00 | @daily   | BACKUP INTO 's3://test/schedule-test-core?AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=x&AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=x' WITH detached
(1 row)

For more examples on how to schedule backups that take full and incremental backups, see CREATE SCHEDULE FOR BACKUP.

Advanced examples

For examples of advanced BACKUP and RESTORE use cases, see:

• Incremental backups with a specified destination
• Backup with revision history and point-in-time restore
• Locality-aware backup and restore
• Encrypted backup and restore
• Restore into a different database
• Remove the foreign key before restore
• Restoring users from system.users backup

See also

• BACKUP
• RESTORE
• Take and Restore Encrypted Backups
• Take and Restore Locality-aware Backups
• Take Backups with Revision History and Restore from a Point-in-time
• SQL DUMP
• IMPORT
• Use the Built-in SQL Client
• Other Cockroach Commands

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