I’m writing this the night before we’re going to get some very bad weather. In North Carolina this time of year, that could mean an ice storm. Ice coats all the big and little branches on all the trees, and then they start to shatter onto roofs and overhead cables. I’ve lived all over the lower 48 and in Alaska, and ice storms are by far the worst, especially in a state that doesn’t bury the electrical lines.
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.