Backups

A distributed database is designed to withstand outages to a good degree. However, you should also maintain backups in case of “oops” scenarios like a dropped table.

The yb-admin tool can be used to manage snapshots. Here’s a brief walkthrough.

Some caveats about using snapshots… They are stored on the same server, so this method doesn’t protect against file system corruption. Also, this doesn’t snapshot the schema, just data.

If you don’t already have a test environment, check out a quick test setup here https://github.com/dataindataout/xtest_ansible.