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ScyllaDB Docs ScyllaDB Open Source ScyllaDB for Administrators Procedures Backup and Restore Procedures Backup your Data

Backup your Data¶

Even though ScyllaDB is a fault-tolerant system, it is recommended to regularly back up the data to external storage.

Backup is a per-node procedure. Make sure to back up each node in your cluster. For cluster-wide backup and restore, see ScyllaDB Manager.
Backup works the same for non-encrypted and encrypted SStables. You can use Encryption at Rest available in ScyllaDB Enterprise without affecting the backup procedure.

You can choose one of the following:

Full Backup - Copy the entire data of a node.
Incremental Backup - Updates (delta) - flushed SSTables.

Full Backup - Snapshots¶

Snapshots are taken using nodetool snapshot. First, the command flushes the MemTables from memory to SSTables on disk, and afterward, it creates a hard link for each SSTable in each keyspace. With time, SSTables are compacted, but the hard link keeps a copy of each file. This takes up an increasing amount of disk space. It is important to clear space by clean unnecessary snapshots.

Procedure

1. Data can only be restored from a snapshot of the table schema, where data exists in a backup. Backup your schema with the following command:

$: cqlsh -e "DESC SCHEMA WITH INTERNALS" > <schema_name.cql>

For example:

$: cqlsh -e "DESC SCHEMA WITH INTERNALS" > db_schema.cql

Warning

To get a proper schema description, you need to use cqlsh at least in version 6.0.19. Restoring a schema backup created by an older version of cqlsh may lead to data resurrection or data loss. To check the version of your cqlsh, you can use cqlsh --version.

2. Take a snapshot, including every keyspace you want to backup.

$ nodetool snapshot <KEYSPACE_NAME>

For example:

$ nodetool snapshot mykeyspace

The snapshot is created under ScyllaDB data directory /var/lib/scylla/data
It will have the following structure:
keyspace_name/table_name-UUID/snapshots/snapshot_name

For example:

/mykeyspace/team_roster-91cd2060f99d11e6a47a000000000000/snapshots/1487847672222

From one of the nodes, recreate the schema. Repeat these steps for each node in the cluster.

Incremental Backup¶

Enabling the incremental backup (disabled by default) will create a hard-link from each SSTable, right after it is flushed, to a backups directory.

For a complete point in time backup, the following is required:

A snapshot

All incremental backups and commit logs from the time of the snapshot.

Make sure to delete unnecessary incremental backups. ScyllaDB does not do this automatically.

Procedure

1. In the /etc/scylla/scylla.yaml file set the incremental backups parameters to true and restart the ScyllaDB service. Snapshot are created under ScyllaDB data directory /var/lib/scylla/data
with the following structure:
keyspace_name/table_name-UUID/backups/backups_name

For example:

/mykeyspace/team_roster-91cd2060f99d11e6a47a000000000000/backups/1437827672721

Additional Resources¶

ScyllaDB Snapshots

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