Backing up and restoring the database

Creating regular database backups is an important part of basic maintenance tasks. Vertica supplies a comprehensive utility, vbr, for this purpose. vbr lets you perform the following operations. Unless otherwise noted, operations are supported in both Enterprise Mode and Eon Mode:

• Back up a database.

• Back up specific objects (schemas or tables) in a database.

• Restore a database or individual objects from backup.

• Copy a database to another cluster. For example, to promote a test cluster to production (Enterprise Mode only).

• Replicate individual objects (schemas or tables) to another cluster.

• List available backups.

When you run vbr, you specify a configuration (.ini) file. In this file you specify all of the configuration parameters for the operation: what to back up, where to back it up, how many backups to keep, whether to encrypt transmissions, and much more. Vertica provides several Sample vbr configuration files that you can use as templates.

You can use vbr to restore a backup created by vbr. Typically, you use the same configuration file for both operations. Common use cases introduces the most common vbr operations.

When performing a backup, you can save your data to one of the following locations:

• Local directory on each node

• Remote file system

• Different Vertica cluster (effectively cloning your database)

• Cloud storage

You cannot back up an Enterprise Mode database and restore it in Eon Mode, or vice versa.

Supported cloud storage

Vertica supports backup and restore operations in the following cloud storage locations:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3

• S3-compatible private cloud storage, such as Pure Storage or Minio

• Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

• Azure Blob Storage

If you are backing up an Eon Mode database, you must use a supported cloud storage location.

You cannot perform backup or restore operations between different cloud providers. For example, you cannot back up or restore from GCS to an S3 location.

Additional considerations for HDFS storage locations

If your database has any storage locations on HDFS, additional configuration is required to enable those storage locations for backup operations. See Requirements for backing up and restoring HDFS storage locations.