Create Backup Schedule

This section describes how to create a schedule to automatically start backups.

Backup scheduling is based on full backups and incremental backups. For more information, see Backup Essentials.

Prerequisites

You must have an archive volume that contains the backup that you want to restore. For more information, see Create Remote Archive Volume.

Procedure

This procedure is carried out using ConfD. For more information, see ConfD.

To determine the names and IDs of the database, archive volumes, and existing backups, you can also use the Administration API. For more information, see List Backups.

The following examples are written in Bash on a Linux terminal and use the tool confd_client, which is accessed by connecting to EXAClusterOS on the database nodes. You can also interact with ConfD using Python and XML-RPC. For more information, see ConfD.

Placeholder values are normally indicated with UPPERCASE characters. Replace the placeholders with your own values.

  1. To find the name of the database, use the ConfD job db_list. For example:

    confd_client -c db_list

  2. Each backup is written to an archive volume. By default, an S3 bucket is created during deployment and configured as a remote archive volume with the name cloud_data_remote_volume.

    Use the ConfD job st_volume_list to find the names of the available local archive volumes:

    confd_client -c st_volume_list | grep name

    Use the ConfD job remote_volume_list to find the names of the available remote archive volumes:

    confd_client -c remote_volume_list

    You can also find the volume ID using ConfD.

    • For remote archive volumes, use the ConfD job remote_volume_info to find the ID stored under “vid”.

      Remote archive volume IDs typically start at 10001.

    • For local archive volumes, use the ConfD job st_volume_info to find the ID stored under “id”.

  3. Create the backup schedule using the ConfD job db_backup_add_schedule.

    If a local archive volume runs out of free space, expired backups will be automatically deleted. Expired remote archive volumes will not be deleted by this function.

    A common backup schedule is a weekly backup with an expiration of 10 days and incremental backups Monday - Saturday with an expiration of 3 days. To set up this configuration, create two backup schedules. For example:

    confd_client -c db_backup_add_schedule -a '{db_name: DATABASE_NAME, backup_name: weekly_full_backup, backup_volume_name: VOLUME_NAME, enabled: True, level: 0, expire: "1w 3d",  minute: "0", hour: "0", day: "*", month: "*", weekday: "0"}'
    confd_client -c db_backup_add_schedule -a '{db_name: DATABASE_NAME, backup_name: daily_incremental, backup_volume_name: VOLUME_NAME, enabled: True, level: 1, expire: "3d",  minute: "0", hour: "0", day: "*", month: "*", weekday: "1,2,3,4,5,6"}'

Verification

Use the ConfD job db_info to verify that the schedule is created. The information is found under config > backups.

confd_client -c db_info -a 'db_name: DATABASE_NAME'

Example output:

config:
  _sec_name: 'DB : Exasol'
  auto_start: true
  backups:
    daily_incremental:
      day: '*'
      enabled: true
      expire: 259200
      hour: '0'
      level: 1
      minute: '0'
      month: '*'
      volume: r0002
      weekday: 1,2,3,4,5,6
    weekly_full_backup:
      day: '*'
      enabled: true
      expire: 864000
      hour: '0'
      level: 0
      minute: '0'
      month: '*'
      volume: r0002
      weekday: '0'