Backing up and Restoring Data

Working with backups is a crucial part of any analytics infrastructure. There is rich backup and restore functionality built into Altinity.Cloud, but some features cannot be directly accessed by users. We’ll look at how to create backups, then we’ll talk about some scenarios for restoring clusters (or individual tables) from backups.

Creating backups

There are a couple of ways of backing up your ClickHouse® clusters:

• Creating a backup manually - You can create a backup of a single ClickHouse cluster. This is done from the Clusters view in the Altinity Cloud Manager. Click the ACTIONS menu and select Create Backup to get started. See the page Creating a Cluster Backup in the User Guide for all the details.
• Creating backups on a schedule - You can do that for a single ClickHouse cluster or for all the clusters in the environment:
  • If you’re an administrator of your Altinity.Cloud environment, you can define a backup schedule to back up all the ClickHouse clusters in your environment. All the details are on the Configuring Backups page in the Configuring your Environment section of the Administrator Guide.
  • To define a schedule for an individual cluster, to go the Clusters view in the Altinity Cloud Manager and click the Backup Settings item in the CONFIGURE menu. See Configuring Backup Settings in the User Guide for the details. NOTE: The backup schedule for an individual cluster overrides any schedule set at the environment level.

We’ll start by discussing the use cases for restoring backups, we’ll move on to your options for configuring backups, then we’ll look at the Cluster Restore Wizard and how to Restore an individual table.

Restoring backups - use cases

Please contact Altinity support if you need to restore a backup. The response time for urgent requests is under 4 hours on the Enterprise Support plan, but usually we respond faster.

The most common use cases you’ll encounter are:

• Partial data corruption in the table - it is possible to restore the table in the following ways:
  • Restore a full table in place - Can be done by users; see Restoring an individual table below.
  • Restore a full table into a separate database for inspection and point fixes, copying data manually - Contact Altinity Support.
  • Restore specific partitions in place - Contact Altinity Support.
• Accidental drop table - The table can be fully restored in place by users; see Restoring an individual table below.
• Accidental drop cluster - Difficult to do, but the cluster can be fully restored, preserving its configuration. Contact Altinity Support.
• Restoring a backup for testing purposes (for testing upgrades, hardware etc.) Contact Altinity Support.
  Possible use cases include:
  • Restoring a single database to a separate database of an existing cluster
  • Restoring a cluster into a new cluster
• Restoring a cluster into a new cluster in different region or environment - Contact Altinity Support.

Restoring backups - common tasks

When you’re restoring data from backups, there are several common tasks you’re likely to do, all of which are covered in the following pages: