Incremental Backup in Greenplum Database

Post date: Nov 17, 2013 4:36:24 PM

1. Greenplum Database Version 4.2.5 and later supports Incremental backup.

2. gpcrondump and gpdbrestore utilities support incremental backups and restores of append-only tables including column-oriented tables.

3. Incremental backups are not supported with Data Domain Boost. 

4. To create an incremental backup or restore data from an incremental backup, you need the complete backup set. 

5. A complete backup set consists of a full backup and any incremental backups that were created after the last full backup.

7. The difference between an incremental backup and a full backup is that append-only tables are backed up only if one of the following operations was performed on the table after the last backup: ALTER TABLE, INSERT, TRUNCATE, DROP and then re-create the table For a partitioned, append-only tables, only the changed table partitions are backed up.

8. Because incremental backups are table-based for append-only tables, incremental backups are efficient when the updates are made to data in tables that are separate from tables that contain unchanged data, and the total amount of data in tables that have changed is small compared to the data in the tables that contain unchanged data.

9. Incremental backups are also efficient with append-only partition tables if only a few table partitions are being updated. An incremental backup only backs up the partitions that have changed.

10. When you archive incremental backups, all incremental backups between the last full backup and the target incremental backup must be archived. You must archive all the files that are created to back up the master and all segments.

11. Changes to the Greenplum Database segment configuration invalidate incremental backups. After you change the segment configuration you must create a full backup before you can create an incremental backup.