How do I backup my FeatureBase Community installation?

You can create FeatureBase backups on the CLI using the featurebase backup or featurebase backuptar commands and suitable flags.

What’s included in the backup?

A featurebase backup includes:

schema
key translation data
indexes
Allocated IDs
Unaltered records

What’s excluded from the backups

External lookup database (backup separately)
IDs committed by the auto ID feature before the backup starts
Node configurations
Other FeatureBase components

Before you begin

Install FeatureBase Community

Obtain Administrator permissions to the FeatureBase cluster

Stop any jobs that create, alter or delete records before running a backup. Only existing, unaltered records are guaranteed to be backed-up.

What’s the difference between backup and backuptar?

backup

The backup command should be used when you are prioritizing backup speed and want to write the backup to local disk. This command allows for the parallelization of copying rbf files, so it can complete faster than backuptar. Additionally, this command will check if there is space on the server for the backup before it runs. The output of this command are all of the uncompressed directories and files.

backuptar

The backuptar command copies the rbf files in an append fashion and streams them to output one at a time. This means it cannot be parallelized, but it can be helpful if you’d like pipe this stream into other commands, such as writing the backup to another location other than local disk. This command will generally take longer than backup as it backs up up each file sequentially. The output of this command is a file in a compressed tar format.

Syntax

featurebase [backup|backuptar]
  {--host
    [ {https://hostname:port --auth-token <token> <tls_flags>}
      | hostname:port
    ]
  [--no-sync]
  {[-o|--output] /backup-directory/path/}

Arguments

Backup flags

Argument	Description	Required?	Additional information
`-no-sync`	Backup runs without the operating system moving data to persistent storage.	Optional	Override storage synchronization
`-o` or `-output`	Backup output directory. Add file name with `backuptar`	Yes
`/backup-directory/path/`	Backup directory which will be created if it does not exist. Add file name with `backuptar`	Yes	Backup process will fail if directory not empty

Common Backup/Restore flags

Argument	Data type	Description	Required?	Additional information
`--host`		Specify a FeatureBase node	Yes
`https://featurebase-hostname-or-ip:port`	string	`https` is required for authenticated FeatureBase clusters. Requires `auth-token`	For authenticated clusters
`featurebase-hostname-or-ip:port`	string	Primary hostname of the FeatureBase cluster to be backed up.	Yes	Determine primary host settings
`--auth-token <token>`		Authorization token required for authentication	For authenticated clusters	Generate an authentication token
`--concurrency <int_val>`	Integer	Define a concurrency value to increase the number of files backed up. Defaults to `1`.	Optional	Not applicable for `backuptar` or when restoring to new clusters.

TLS authentication flags

Flag	Description	Required?	Additional information
`--tls.ca-certificate`	TLS CA certitificate to use for verifying the server certificate (defaults to CA certs installed to system)	For TLS authentication

Additional information

Determine primary host

The primary host is designated by isPrimary:true in the results from the following command:

curl featurebase:10101/status

Override storage synchronization

By default, featurebase backup will wait for all backup files to be committed to persistent storage before terminating.
no-sync overrides this setting

Use of no-sync risks loss of backup date should the backup system lose power.

Examples

featurebase backup overwrites any files in the destination folder. tar the backup folder then move the file to a new location before performing a backup.

Increased backup speed

Increase backup speed by setting the concurrency value and turning off sync.

featurebase backup
  --concurrency 2
  --host featurebase-hostname-or-ip:10101
  -o /path/to/backup/
  --no-sync

Host tar backup with gzip

featurebase backuptar
  --host featurebase-hostname-or-ip:10101
  --output - | gzip > backup.tar.gz

Authenticated backup

featurebase backup
  --host https://featurebase-hostname-or-ip:10101
  -o /backups/featurebase-backups
  --auth-token <token>

Backup with TLS

featurebase backup
  --host featurebase-hostname-or-ip:10101
  -o /path/to/backup/
  --tls.ca-certificate ca.crt
  --tls.certificate client.crt
  --tls.key client.key

No sync backup with manual backup to remote folder

featurebase backup --host featurebase-hostname-or-ip:10101 -o /path/to/backup/ --no-sync