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Scheduled Backups

This guide follows on from the Get Started guides. Please make sure that you have an Operator installation ready. It also assumes that the MoveTables and Resharding user guides have been followed (which take you through steps 101 to 306).

This guide is useful only if you are using the vitess-operator.

Backups #

If you are not already familiar with how backups work in Vitess we suggest you familiarize yourself with them first.

Scheduling backups #

Adding the schedule #

Please note that is not recommended to run production backups every two minutes. These schedules are only an example.

For this example we are going to create two schedules: each will be executed every two minutes, the first one will backup the two customer shards, and the second one will backup the commerce keyspace. The backups will be stored directly inside the Minikube node, but if you want to backup to a cloud storage provider like S3, you can change the location of the backup in 401_scheduled_backups.yaml.

kubectl apply -f 401_scheduled_backups.yaml

After two minutes, we should see three new pods that were created by the operator. Under the hood, these pods are managed by a Kubernetes Job, and their goal is to take a backup of Vitess, as we defined in the strategies field of the 401_scheduled_backups.yaml file.

$ kubectl get pods -n example
NAME                                                              READY   STATUS      RESTARTS      AGE
...
example-vbsc-commerce-ca641fc1-commerce-x-x-1740521040-b892727l   0/1     Completed   0             2m7s
example-vbsc-customer-05e172de-customer-80-x-1740521---04ar59dk   0/1     Completed   0             2m17s
example-vbsc-customer-05e172de-customer-x-80-1740521---6535gj8c   0/1     Completed   0             2m17s
...

Listing backups #

Now we can list the available backups by getting the vtb (VitessBackup) objects in our Kubernetes cluster. We can see six backups: For every keyspace/shard, one backup by the initial vtbackup pod, that spawns as we create a new shard, and we can see a second backup created more recently (~46 seconds ago) by the scheduled backup CRD.

$ minikube ssh
docker@minikube:~$ sudo chmod o+rwx -R /tmp/example/ # required to give Minikube permissions to read the Vitess backups
docker@minikube:~$ exit

$ kubectl get vtb -n example
NAME                                                      AGE
example-commerce-x-x-20250225-214735-b82e162-74db1145     16m
example-commerce-x-x-20250225-220602-47f20b54-75d9f5c5    46s
example-customer-80-x-20250225-215751-5e335eca-fb525825   6m51s
example-customer-80-x-20250225-220602-706d77e3-b930b08c   46s
example-customer-x-80-20250225-215747-c74a3a36-45b61315   6m51s
example-customer-x-80-20250225-220558-26a8bbfe-0b58cca8   46s

Cleanup #

Congratulations, you have correctly scheduled recurring backups of your Vitess cluster.

If you want, you can now clean up the entire cluster by running: minikube delete.

Scheduled Backups