Backups in Managed Service for Greenplum®

Managed Service for Greenplum® supports automatic and manual database backups.

Managed Service for Greenplum® enables you to restore your cluster to a specific recovery point where the data is consistent. This feature is known as Point-in-Time-Recovery (PITR). Recovery points are created every hour. When you specify a time to recover data for, the service will use the backup closest to that point in time. When recovering the selected cluster backup, records from write-ahead logs (WALs) will be added to the backup data up to the closest recovery point.

For example, if the backup was created on November 10, 2022, 12:00:00 UTC, the current date is November 15, 2022, 19:00:00 UTC, and the latest recovery point was saved on November 15, 2022, 18:00:00 UTC, the cluster can be restored to any recovery point between November 10, 2022, 12:00:01 UTC and November 15, 2022, 18:00:00 UTC, inclusive. If you specify November 15, 2022, 17:30:00 UTC as the recovery time, the cluster will be restored to the recovery point saved on November 15, 2022, 17:00:00 UTC.

PITR mode is enabled by default. It supports automatic backups only.

To restore a cluster from a backup, follow this guide. You can also restore your cluster to move its hosts to a different availability zone. You may need to do this, e.g., if your hosts reside in the ru-central1-c availability zone which is to be deprecated.

Creating backupsCreating backups

The first and every second automatic backup, as well as all manually created backups are full backups of all databases. Other backups are incremental and store only the data that has changed since the previous backup to save space.

A backup is automatically created every day. You cannot disable automatic backups. However, for such backups, you can specify a time interval during which the backup will start when you create or update a cluster. The default time is 22:00 - 23:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

After a backup is created, it is compressed for storage. Append-optimized tables use data deduplication technology: newly added data or old data last archived more than 30 days ago is copied. The backup size does not include the deduplicated part size, so the displayed value can be significantly smaller than the data size in the cluster.

Backups are only created on running clusters. If you are not using your Managed Service for Greenplum® cluster 24/7, check the settings of backup start time.

For more information about creating a backup manually, see Managing backups.

Storing backupsStoring backups

Storing backups in Managed Service for Greenplum®:

• Backups are stored in object storage as binary files and are encrypted using GPG. Each cluster has its own encryption keys.

• The total backup size is a whole of data copy and WAL sizes. The backup size does not include the amount of deduplicated append-optimized table data. The size of WAL data depends on the amount of made changes and is comparable to the backup size. You can get both values with a list of backups.

• Automatic backups are stored for seven days. Manual backups are stored until the user deletes them manually.

• After you delete a cluster, all its backups are kept for seven days.

• Backup storage is not subject to quotas or limits for cluster storage space.

Checking backup recoveryChecking backup recovery

To test how backup works, restore a cluster from a backup and check the integrity of your data.

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