The BACKUP feature is only available to enterprise users. For non-enterprise backups, see cockroach dump.
CockroachDB's BACKUP statement allows you to create full or incremental backups of your cluster's schema and data that are consistent as of a given timestamp. Backups can be with or without revision history.
Because CockroachDB is designed with high fault tolerance, these backups are designed primarily for disaster recovery (i.e., if your cluster loses a majority of its nodes) through RESTORE. Isolated issues (such as small-scale node outages) do not require any intervention.
Functional details
Backup targets
You can backup entire tables (which automatically includes their indexes) or views. Backing up a database simply backs up all of its tables and views.
BACKUP only offers table-level granularity; it does not support backing up subsets of a table.
Object dependencies
Dependent objects must be backed up at the same time as the objects they depend on.
| Object | Depends On |
|---|---|
| Table with foreign key constraints | The table it REFERENCES; however, this dependency can be removed during the restore. |
| Table with a sequence | The sequence it uses; however, this dependency can be removed during the restore. |
| Views | The tables used in the view's SELECT statement. |
| Interleaved tables | The parent table in the interleaved hierarchy. |
Users and privileges
The system.users table stores your users and their passwords. To restore your users, you must first backup the system.users table, and then use this procedure.
Restored tables inherit privilege grants from the target database; they do not preserve privilege grants from the backed up table because the restoring cluster may have different users.
Table-level privileges must be granted to users after the restore is complete.
Backup types
CockroachDB offers two types of backups: full and incremental.
Full backups
Full backups contain an unreplicated copy of your data and can always be used to restore your cluster. These files are roughly the size of your data and require greater resources to produce than incremental backups. You can take full backups as of a given timestamp and (optionally) include the available revision history.
Incremental backups
Incremental backups are smaller and faster to produce than full backups because they contain only the data that has changed since a base set of backups you specify (which must include one full backup, and can include many incremental backups). You can take incremental backups either as of a given timestamp or with full revision history.
Note the following restriction: Incremental backups can only be created within the garbage collection period of the base backup's most recent timestamp. This is because incremental backups are created by finding which data has been created or modified since the most recent timestamp in the base backup––that timestamp data, though, is deleted by the garbage collection process.
You can configure garbage collection periods using the ttlseconds replication zone setting.
Backups with revision history
This is a beta feature. It is currently undergoing continued testing. Please file a Github issue with us if you identify a bug.
You can create full or incremental backups with revision history:
- Taking full backups with revision history allows you to back up every change made within the garbage collection period leading up to and including the given timestamp.
- Taking incremental backups with revision history allows you to back up every change made since the last backup and within the garbage collection period leading up to and including the given timestamp. You can take incremental backups with revision history even when your previous full or incremental backups were taken without revision history.
You can configure garbage collection periods using the ttlseconds replication zone setting. Taking backups with revision history allows for point-in-time restores within the revision history.
Performance
The BACKUP process minimizes its impact to the cluster's performance by distributing work to all nodes. Each node backs up only a specific subset of the data it stores (those for which it serves writes; more details about this architectural concept forthcoming), with no two nodes backing up the same data.
For best performance, we also recommend always starting backups with a specific timestamp at least 10 seconds in the past. For example:
> BACKUP...AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s';
This improves performance by decreasing the likelihood that the BACKUP will be retried because it contends with other statements/transactions. However, because AS OF SYSTEM TIME returns historical data, your reads might be stale.
Automating backups
We recommend automating daily backups of your cluster.
To automate backups, you must have a client send the BACKUP statement to the cluster.
Once the backup is complete, your client will receive a BACKUP response.
Viewing and controlling backups jobs
After CockroachDB successfully initiates a backup, it registers the backup as a job, which you can view with SHOW JOBS.
After the backup has been initiated, you can control it with PAUSE JOB, RESUME JOB, and CANCEL JOB.
If initiated correctly, the statement returns when the backup is finished or if it encounters an error. In some cases, the backup can continue after an error has been returned (the error message will tell you that the backup has resumed in background).
Synopsis
The BACKUP statement cannot be used within a transaction.
Required privileges
Only members of the admin role can run BACKUP. By default, the root user belongs to the admin role.
Parameters
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
table_pattern |
The table or view you want to back up. |
name |
The name of the database you want to back up (i.e., create backups of all tables and views in the database). |
destination |
The URL where you want to store the backup. For information about this URL structure, see Backup File URLs. |
AS OF SYSTEM TIME timestamp |
Back up data as it existed as of timestamp. The timestamp must be more recent than your cluster's last garbage collection (which defaults to occur every 25 hours, but is configurable per table). |
WITH revision_history |
Create a backup with full revision history that records every change made to the cluster within the garbage collection period leading up to and including the given timestamp. |
INCREMENTAL FROM full_backup_location |
Create an incremental backup using the full backup stored at the URL full_backup_location as its base. For information about this URL structure, see Backup File URLs.Note: It is not possible to create an incremental backup if one or more tables were created, dropped, or truncated after the full backup. In this case, you must create a new full backup. |
incremental_backup_location |
Create an incremental backup that includes all backups listed at the provided URLs. Lists of incremental backups must be sorted from oldest to newest. The newest incremental backup's timestamp must be within the table's garbage collection period. For information about this URL structure, see Backup File URLs. For more information about garbage collection, see Configure Replication Zones. |
Backup file URLs
We will use the URL provided to construct a secure API call to the service you specify. The path to each backup must be unique, and the URL for your backup's destination/locations must use the following format:
[scheme]://[host]/[path]?[parameters]
| Location | Scheme | Host | Parameters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | s3 |
Bucket name | AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SESSION_TOKEN |
| Azure | azure |
N/A (see Example file URLs | AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY, AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME |
| Google Cloud 1 | gs |
Bucket name | AUTH (optional; can be default, implicit, or specified), CREDENTIALS |
| HTTP 2 | http |
Remote host | N/A |
| NFS/Local 3 | nodelocal |
Empty or nodeID 4 (see Example file URLs) |
N/A |
| S3-compatible services 5 | s3 |
Bucket name | AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SESSION_TOKEN, AWS_REGION 6 (optional), AWS_ENDPOINT |
If you write to nodelocal storage in a multi-node cluster, individual data files will be written to the extern directories of arbitrary nodes and will likely not work as intended. To work correctly, each node must have the --external-io-dir flag point to the same NFS mount or other network-backed, shared storage.
The location parameters often contain special characters that need to be URI-encoded. Use Javascript's encodeURIComponent function or Go language's url.QueryEscape function to URI-encode the parameters. Other languages provide similar functions to URI-encode special characters.
If your environment requires an HTTP or HTTPS proxy server for outgoing connections, you can set the standard HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables when starting CockroachDB.
1If the
AUTHparameter is not specified, thecloudstorage.gs.default.keycluster setting will be used if it is non-empty, otherwise theimplicitbehavior is used. If theAUTHparameter isimplicit, all GCS connections use Google's default authentication strategy. If theAUTHparameter isdefault, thecloudstorage.gs.default.keycluster setting must be set to the contents of a service account file which will be used during authentication. New in v19.1: If theAUTHparameter isspecified, GCS connections are authenticated on a per-statement basis, which allows the JSON key object to be sent in theCREDENTIALSparameter. The JSON key object should be base64-encoded (using the standard encoding in RFC 4648).2 You can create your own HTTP server with Caddy or nginx. A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the
cloudstorage.http.custom_cacluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from HTTPS URLs.3 The file system backup location on the NFS drive is relative to the path specified by the
--external-io-dirflag set while starting the node. If the flag is set todisabled, then imports from local directories and NFS drives are disabled.4 New in v19.1: The host component of NFS/Local can either be empty or the
nodeID. If thenodeIDis specified, it is currently ignored (i.e., any node can be sent work and it will look in its local input/output directory); however, thenodeIDwill likely be required in the future.5 A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the
cloudstorage.http.custom_cacluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from an S3-compatible service.6 The
AWS_REGIONparameter is optional since it is not a required parameter for most S3-compatible services. Specify the parameter only if your S3-compatible service requires it.
Example file URLs
| Location | Example |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | s3://acme-co/employees.sql?AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=123&AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=456 |
| Azure | azure://employees.sql?AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY=123&AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME=acme-co |
| Google Cloud | gs://acme-co/employees.sql |
| HTTP | http://localhost:8080/employees.sql |
| NFS/Local | nodelocal:///path/employees, nodelocal://2/path/employees Note: If you write to nodelocal storage in a multi-node cluster, individual data files will be written to the extern directories of arbitrary nodes and will likely not work as intended. To work correctly, each node must have the --external-io-dir flag point to the same NFS mount or other network-backed, shared storage. |
Examples
Per our guidance in the Performance section, we recommend starting backups from a time at least 10 seconds in the past using AS OF SYSTEM TIME.
Backup a single table or view
> BACKUP bank.customers \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s';
Backup multiple tables
> BACKUP bank.customers, bank.accounts \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s';
Backup an entire database
> BACKUP DATABASE bank \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s';
Backup with revision history
> BACKUP DATABASE bank \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '-10s' WITH revision_history;
Create incremental backups
Incremental backups must be based off of full backups you've already created.
> 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';
Create incremental backups with revision history
> BACKUP DATABASE bank \
TO 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-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;
See also
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