Do cbbackupmgr repos persist across clusters

Couchbase Server
1

We make extensive use of views (migrating to N1QL but we have other priorities atm) so when we need to make changes to our production cluster we do so by spinning up a fresh cluster, adding our production views, then populating it with XDCR. When all the data is transferred and the views built we point traffic at the new cluster and reverse the XDCR so that we have the old cluster as a hot backup for a day or two while we make sure that all the servers are running as expected on the new cluster.

I’ve just finished a new backup routine that uses cbbackupmgr (previously we used cbbackup) and I’m wondering if my incremental backups will continue to work once they’re running on the new cluster? Or will I need to start fresh when we do a cluster replacement?

Just so I don’t find out the hard way. Currently we’re running Enterprise 4.6.3. Planning to upgrade to 5 in a few weeks.

2

I would recommend creating a backup repo per cluster. You won’t get yourself into any trouble by running the backup on one cluster and then the other, but you won’t get an incremental backup.

When you setup two clusters with XDCR the data will be the same in both clusters , but the sequence numbers and failover table which is used to order events in an individual cluster will be different. All of Couchbase’s backup tools (including cbbackupmgr) rely on the sequence numbers and failover table to know where to resume from when doing an incremental backup.

If you run a few backups on one cluster (in the scenario described) and then point the next backup at the other cluster then cbbackupmgr will end up doing a full backup. This won’t cause any problems for cbbackupmgr, but it will mean that you’re not doing an incremental backup.