Backup Destinations

Backups can be made to the local file system or a remote destination. Off-site (non-local) backups are recommended to reduce the risk of the loss of information.

• Display available backup destinations with backup list.
• Add a new backup destination with backup add <location-name> <URI>.

Local backups are stored on a separate backup volume and the localbackup destination is pre-configured.

• Display the list of localbackups with backup list localbackup, for example:

  $ backup list localbackup
     localbackup:
        URI: file:///backups
        Backups:
           2016-06-21 13:33
           2016-06-21 13:16
  

If the backup volume is too small, it can be increased in size with the drives add command described in the Drive control topic of the Platform Guide. If the localbackup destination is removed or renamed, an ISO file upgrade will no longer function. Therefore, it is imperative that this destination is not removed.

Example:

backup add myserverbackup sftp://user:password@server/path

Backups to sftp require ssh key-based authentication to be setup. Refer to SSH key management for further details.

If a common remote backup point is to be used by all nodes in the cluster, the backup destination needs to be added to each node. This can be automated by using cluster remote execution, for example:

cluster run all backup add myserverbackup sftp://user:password@server/path

The creation of scheduled backups of all nodes is done for failover reasons. While only the primary node backup contains data, in a failover scenario, the new primary node will contain the backup data.