I have a Couchbase Server, Community Edition that I am using in a production environment, supporting applications that also save data to SQL Server.
Our SQL Server takes differential backups of the main application database every 15 minutes.
To match this backup schedule, we also take FULL backups of Couchbase every 15 minutes. (The reason we take full backups, is because incremental backup is not supported in the Couchbase Community Edition).
So, as the data in Couchbase keeps growing, the time required to take a full backup is gradually increasing. In a few more months, the amount of time to take a full backup will likely exceed 15 minutes. This means that the next full backup will begin before the previous full backup has finished.
Obviously we need to re-evaluate our backup plan. However, until then, my question is: What will happen when the time required to take the backup begins to exceed the interval between each backup?
Will the Universe implode?
Will the data in the backup become less reliable?
Will nothing happen?
…the inevitable day quickly approaches…I’m getting nervous.
Thanks in advance for any information you can provide that might let me know what to expect.
To match this backup schedule, we also take FULL backups of Couchbase every 15 minutes. (The reason we take full backups, is because incremental backup is not supported in the Couchbase Community Edition).
The Community Edition does support Incremental backup via the cbbackup and cbrestore commands. The new cbbackupmgr command is not available on Community Edition. If you have seen this been incorrectly reported please let me know and I will get it fixed.
Obviously we need to re-evaluate our backup plan. However, until then, my question is: What will happen when the time required to take the backup begins to exceed the interval between each backup?
In this case the two full backups are independent tasks and will not directly impact each other. There is a possibility that on the Couchbase Server side that more disk space will be used while the backup tasks are running. This is because when streaming the data a file handle will be held open to the underlying vBucket files. These files are regularly compacted and with two on going backups there could be up to 3 versions temporally around (They will not been as the older versions will be marked for deletion at the file system level ).
Thank you for the reply. We are on couchbase 4.5 CE, and currently working on a plan to upgrade to 6.0 CE. Has incremental backup been added in the newest version of CE? According to this table, it seems like it’s not supported: https://www.couchbase.com/products/editions. At any rate, attempting to do any kind of incremental backup with the cbbackup command results in an error saying it’s not supported in the community edition.
