Built-in backup for Cloudant

Currently there is no built-in backup functionality in both Cloudant managed offering and Cloudant Local product. The available "solutions" require manual set-up - even for a fully managed database.

At the same time, Cloudant is positioned as a transactional database, which more-or-less assumes that it supports creating consistent backups - both full and incremental.

A complete backup solution for Cloudant should allow the administrator to configure the backup schedule (e.g. full weekly and incremental-delta daily backups), the time window to store the backups, and the minimal number of full backup copies. Having the backup configuration in place, the administrator should be able to restore to any of the backups.

The way Cloudant stores data potentially allows for intelligent ways to produce incremental backups - and for quick restoration. This could be a huge competitive differentiator, being able to restore the logical state of the database in almost zero time.