Run Commands

Enterprise Server Backup

Learn how to back-up and restore the state of a production Enterprise Server.

This page will walk you through the main steps required to manually back up and restore the state of a Pachyderm cluster in production. Details on how to perform those steps might vary depending on your infrastructure and cloud provider / on-premises setup. Refer to your provider’s documentation.

Overview #

Pachyderm state is stored in two main places:

  • An object-store holding Pachyderm’s data.
  • A PostgreSQL instance made up of one or two databases: pachyderm holding Pachyderm’s metadata and dex holding authentication data.

Backing up a Pachyderm cluster involves snapshotting both the object store and the PostgreSQL database(s), in a consistent state, at a given point in time.

Restoring it involves re-populating the database(s) and the object store using those backups, then recreating a Pachyderm cluster.

ℹī¸
  • Make sure that you have a bucket for backup use, separate from the object store used by your cluster.
  • Depending on the reasons behind your cluster recovery, you might choose to use an existing vs. a new instance of PostgreSQL and/or the object store.

Backup A Standalone Enterprise Server #

Backing up and restoring an Enterprise Server is similar to the backing up and restoring of a regular cluster, with three slight variations:

  1. The name of its Kubernetes deployment is pach-enterprise versus pachd in the case of a regular cluster.
  2. The Enterprise Server does not use an Object Store.
  3. An Enterprise server only requires a dex database.
⚠ī¸

Make sure that pachctl and kubectl are pointing to the right cluster. Check your Enterprise Server context: pachctl config get active-enterprise-context, or pachctl config set active-enterprise-context <my-enterprise-context-name> --overwrite to set it.

  • Pause the Enterprise Server like you would pause a regular cluster by running pachctl enterprise pause (Enterprise users), or using kubectl.
ℹī¸

kubectl users: There is a difference with the pause of a regular cluster. The deployment of the enterprise server is named pach-enterprise; therefore, the first command should be:

kubectl scale deployment pach-enterprise --replicas 0 

There is no need to pause all the Pachyderm clusters registered to the Enterprise Server to backup the enterprise server; however, pausing the Enterprise server will result in your clusters becoming unavailable.

  • As a reminder, the Enterprise Server does not use any object-store. Therefore, the backup of the Enterprise Server only consists in backing up the database dex.

  • Resume the operations on your Enterprise Server by running pachctl enterprise unpause (Enterprise users) to scale the pach-enterprise deployment back up. Alternatively, if you used kubectl, run:

    kubectl scale deployment pach-enterprise --replicas 1

Restore An Enterprise Server #