The Cluster Restore Wizard

The easy way to restore from a backup

The Cluster Restore Wizard lets you restore a cluster from a backup. To restore a backup, begin by selecting Restore a Backup on the ACTIONS menu for your cluster.

WARNING: FOR ADVANCED USERS ONLY.

We’ll go through all of the steps and options next, but if you’re looking for help on a particular section of the wizard, you can skip ahead to any of the tabs:

Backup location
Source cluster
Source backup
Tables
Destination cluster
Review and confirm

1. Backup Location tab

The first step is to specify the location of the backup you’re restoring.

Option 1A - Backup is in Altinity.Cloud

The simplest case is a backup stored in your Altinity.Cloud environment:

Figure 1 - Backup is in Altinity.Cloud

Field details

Source Environment

The name of the Altinity.Cloud environment that holds the backup. Click the down arrow to see a list of all of your environments.

Click NEXT to continue.

Option 1B - Backup is in your AWS account

Another alternative, of course, is that the backup is stored in your AWS or GCP account. The details you need to provide are different in each case, as you would expect. You’ll see this panel if your backup is at AWS:

Figure 2 - Backup is in AWS

Field details

Access Key

The access key for your AWS account.

Secret Key

The secret key for your AWS account.

Region

The AWS region where your backup is stored.

Bucket

The name of the bucket where your backup is stored.

ACM-Compatible Folder Structure

Check this box if the backup was created by ACM or if you know the backup has a fully ACM-compatible structure.

Click NEXT to continue.

NOTE: When you click NEXT, the ACM takes your credentials and attempts to access the bucket you named in the region you selected. If that fails, you’ll get an error message with details on what went wrong:

Figure 3 - Invalid AWS bucket name or credentials

You’ll have to fix the error before you can continue.

Option 1C - Backup is in your GCP account

Finally, if you’re on GCP, you’ll see this instead:

Figure 4 - Backup is in GCP

Field details

Credentials JSON

JSON data that contains credentials associated with a GCP service account. That service account can have access to your entire GCP project, or it may be restricted to a single bucket or even a single folder within a single bucket. See the Google Cloud documentation for details:

Region

The GCP region where your backup is stored.

Bucket

The name of the bucket where your backup is stored.

ACM-Compatible Folder Structure

Check this box if the backup was created by ACM or if you know the backup has a fully ACM-compatible structure.

Click NEXT to continue.

NOTE: When you click NEXT, the ACM takes the credentials JSON you entered and attempts to access the bucket you named in the region you selected. If that fails, you’ll get an error message:

Figure 5 - Error message connecting to GCP

You’ll have to fix the error before you can continue.

2. Source Cluster tab

Next we need to select the source cluster for the backup we’re restoring:

Figure 6 - Selecting a source cluster

The available backups are listed in the Cluster column. The Namespace is the Kubernetes namespace that contains your ClickHouse installation. Finally, a checkmark indicates that the backup includes cluster configuration information.

Select a cluster and click NEXT to continue.

3. Source Backup tab

Once you’ve selected a cluster to restore, you’ll see a list of all of the backups for that cluster:

Figure 7 - Selecting a backup for the selected cluster

Select a backup and click NEXT to continue.

4. Tables tab

At this point you’ve specified where the backup is stored, selected the cluster you want to restore, and selected the particular backup of that cluster you want to restore. Next, you need to decide which tables you want to restore.

Option 4A - Restore all tables

The simplest option, of course, is All tables:

Figure 8 - Restoring all tables

Click NEXT to continue.

Option 4B - Restore some tables

You can also specify patterns for the table names and engine types you want to include or exclude:

Figure 9 - Restoring some tables

Separate multiple table or engine patterns with commas.

Patterns can contain splat [*] and question mark [?] wildcards:

The splat matches any sequence of characters before or after a separator. For example, default.* matches all tables in the default database.
The question mark matches a single character. For example, db.??_table matches db.ab_table and db.cd_table.

Click NEXT to continue.

5. Destination Cluster tab

The final step is to specify where to put the restored cluster.

Option 5A - Launch in a new cluster

One option is to simply launch a new cluster:

Figure 10 - Restoring to a new cluster

Enter a name for the destination cluster.

NOTE: If you choose to launch a new cluster, at the end of the Cluster Restore Wizard you’ll be taken to the Launch Cluster Wizard to define all the details of the new cluster.

Click NEXT to continue.

Option 5B - Launch a new cluster based on a source cluster

Another possibility is to use the configuration and settings of the source cluster to create a new cluster:

Figure 11 - Restore to a new cluster based on a source cluster

There are some settings you can change, such as the version of ClickHouse the new cluster should run or how much storage the new cluster should have. Beyond the fields shown on this tab, everything else will be the same.

Field details

Name

The name of the restored cluster.

ClickHouse Version

Select the version of ClickHouse you want your cluster to use. Click the down arrow icon to see a list of available versions. ALTINITY BUILDS is selected by default; that lets you choose which Altinity Stable Build you want to use. You can also click UPSTREAM BUILDS to see other versions of ClickHouse.

Beneath the ClickHouse version is a link to the release notes for the build you’ve selected. The release notes have extensive details of what is new and changed and fixed in each release. Click the link to open the release notes in a new browser tab.

Node Type

Click the down arrow to see what machine types are available. Each item in the list will tell you how many CPUs and how much RAM that machine type has.

Volume Type

Click the down arrow to see what classes of storage are available for your restored ClickHouse cluster.

Node Storage

The amount of storage in GB that each node in the restored cluster will have.

Number of Volumes

The number of storage volumes your restored cluster will have.

Click NEXT to continue.

Option 5C - Launch in an existing cluster

The third option is to restore the backup into an existing cluster:

Figure 12 - Restore to an existing cluster

Click the down arrow icon to see the list of available clusters. Select a cluster and click NEXT to continue.

6. Review and Confirm tab

The Review and Confirm tab lets you go over the choices you’ve made before restoring the cluster:

Figure 13 - Cluster Restore Wizard summary panel

If everything looks good, click CONTINUE.

If you selected Launch a new Cluster on the Destination Cluster tab (option 5A), you’ll be taken to the Launch Cluster Wizard to specify all of the configuration details and settings for the new cluster. When you’ve completed the Launch Cluster Wizard, the ACM will create the new cluster and restore the backup to it.

If you selected anything else on the Destination Cluster tab, the ACM will start restoring the cluster. As you would expect, this may take several minutes. When the cluster is restored, you’ll get an alert at the top of the ACM UI:

Figure 14 - Cluster restored confirmation message