HBase Backup

HBase Backup:

We need to have backup of HBase table offline in some point of time, in spite of the fact that Hadoop and HBase provide replication and redundancy. For this we have some backup option in HBase. These are categorized in two ways:

Offline backup and

Online backup

Online Backup:

Again this is categorized in three ways

Replication: In this method you need to have a 2^nd cluster where you will keep your replication for the data from the 1^st cluster.

Hadoop/HBase Export command: which runs a map reduce job to copy table from one cluster to the same cluster or to other Hadoop cluster. This does not require any kind of downtime for backing/ exporting data.

In this method we need to export the data to the cluster and if we need to restore we need to restore it by Importing.

CopyTable: this is also online backup method which copies table from one cluster to another cluster or to the same cluster.

Offline Backup:

Distcp : this is a kind of file system backup, this copies a directory from HDFS to same cluster or to other cluster.

copyToLocal : this is less reliable way of copying directories from HDFS to local backup drive. If large amount of data is there then you need lot of Hadoop tune-up to copy successfully.

Offline Backup methods are full shutdown backup method, suppose you need to copy HBase you need to stop your HBase cluster, for a successful backup, as the files are being continuously moved, modified and changes while cluster is online, and copying in this scenario may fail.