vtbackup is a batch comand to perform a single pass of backup maintenance for a shard.

When run periodically for each shard, vtbackup can ensure these configurable policies:

• There is always a recent backup for the shard.
• Old backups for the shard are removed.

Whatever system launches vtbackup is responsible for the following:

• Running vtbackup with similar flags that would be used for a vttablet and mysqlctld in the target shard to be backed up.
• Provisioning as much disk space for vtbackup as would be given to vttablet. The data directory MUST be empty at startup. Do NOT reuse a persistent disk.
• Running vtbackup periodically for each shard, for each backup storage location.
• Ensuring that at most one instance runs at a time for a given pair of shard and backup storage location.
• Retrying vtbackup if it fails.
• Alerting human operators if the failure is persistent.

Example Usage #

On a running Vitess cluster, the following command will create a backup using vtbackup for keyspace commerce and shard 0.

export TOPOLOGY_FLAGS="--topo_implementation etcd2 --topo_global_server_address localhost:2379 --topo_global_root /vitess/global"
export VTROOT="/tmp"

mkdir -p $VTROOT/{backups,socket}

vtbackup \
 $TOPOLOGY_FLAGS \
 --backup_storage_implementation file \
 --file_backup_storage_root $VTROOT/backups/vitess-local/ \
 --logtostderr=true \
 --mysql_socket $VTROOT/socket/mysql.sock \
 --port 15500 \
 --mysql_port 33306 \
 --init_shard=0 \
 --init_keyspace=commerce \
 --db_dba_user=vt_dba

While it is running, vtbackup serves debugging info and metrics on port 15500, and starts a mysqld daemon serving on port 33306.

Options #