cbbackupmgr Tool

The cbbackupmgr tool is a utility to help manage and store backup and recovery data on disk for your Couchbase Server. It backs up and restores bucket data, views creation scripts, index creation scripts, bucket configurations, and so on. Backups are stored in an Archive Repository that contains each backup.

Only Full Administrators can use the enterprise-grade Backup and Restore tool to back up larger data sets with much higher performance.

Backup and restore capabilities are critical to an overall Disaster Recovery Plan and ensuring business continuity. As part of that plan, it is recommended to define the plan for Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and how the cbbackupmgr tool fits into that plan.

All backup is stored in and recovered from a Backup Respository. In turn, a Backup Respository is stored in a Backup Archive on the filesystem. Each backup job in the Backup Repository stores its backup in two ways:

All bucket data is stored in a secondary smaller database (ForestDB).
All bucket creation scripts and configuration files are stored on the file system as files.

The cbbackupmgr tool is not backward compatible for backups created using cbbackup.

The cbbackupmgr tool is installed with all other tools in the following locations on each platform:

Table 1. Backup Tool Locations
Operating system	Directory locations
Linux	/opt/couchbase/bin/cbbackupmgr
Windows	C:\Program Files\Couchbase\Server\bin\cbbackupmgr Assumes default installation location
Mac OS X	/Applications/Couchbase Server.app/Contents/Resources/couchbase-core/bin/cbbackupmgr

How the Backup and Restore Tool Works

By default, the cbbackupmgr tool performs incremental backups to back up only the new data. However, on a new cluster and for the first time, this tool generates a full backup. Each of the subsequent incremental backups take a fraction of the time taken by the full backup.

Archive Repository

The backup archive is a directory that contains a set of backup repositories as well as logs for the backup client. The backup directory should be modified only by the backup client, and any modifications that are not done by that client might result in a corruption of backup data.

Only one backup client can access the backup archive at one time. If multiple instances of the backup client are running on the same archive at the same time, this might result in corruption. To prevent such corruption instances, you may be required to create multiple backup archives depending on your use case.

Version Compatibility

You must run cbbackupmgr from a Couchbase Server installation with the same major and minor version as the host cluster. For example, to back up data from (or restore data to) a cluster running Couchbase Server 5.5, you must run cbbackupmgr from a Couchbase Server 5.5 node.

To restore a backup, the version of the Couchbase Server installation that was used to create the backup must be compatible with the version of the host cluster to which you want to restore the data. Consult the following table to see which versions are compatible.

Table 2. Enterprise Backup Restore Compatibility
Restore host cluster version / `cbbackupmgr` version:	Can restore data backed up from Couchbase Server version:
Restore host cluster version / `cbbackupmgr` version:	5.5	5.1	5.0	4.6	4.5
Couchbase Server 5.5	✓	✓	✓
Couchbase Server 5.1		✓	✓
Couchbase Server 5.0			✓	✓
Couchbase Server 4.6				✓	✓
Couchbase Server 4.5					✓