Back up and restore Cloudant databases + recommendations

Supported Cloudant backup tooling and recommended process detailed at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/services/Cloudant?topic=cloudant-ibm-cloudant-backup-and-recovery#ibm-cloudant-backup-and-recovery

Short answer is probably no given your context.  Our support team will assist with using the tools/techniques described but customer owns setting it up and making sure it works properly and the data is backed up appropriately. If they are using an object storage for instance this is owned by customer and not something cloudant can commit an SLA to.

Hello Michael,

     Thanks for your explanation.

    I understand Cloudant provides high availability, with three copies of data. I see it's also possible to set up replication, to cover the DR case. What my clients are asking is for guidance on how to use these replication techniques.

    Regarding the option described at https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/2016/03/22/simple-couchdb-and-cloudant-backup/, the $1M question is, "is this supported by IBM?" In other words, if I backup and restore the database described here, will IBM support it?

    Thanks again,

Eduardo

Backing up a Cloudant database is an interesting case and there are lots of mechanisms to do this depending on your requirements. To start, Cloudant automatically stores all data in triplicate across three separate physical nodes in a cluster for HA/DR within a geo/data center. Additionally customers can use replication to create active/active or active/passive setup across geographies to another cluster for more resilient HA/DR. To prevent against data corruption due to accidental deletion or application rollout misconfiguration, then you will need to take a point in time copy of the database. Given its an eventually consistent database with three copies, a traditional database/filesystem snapshot mechanism doesn't exist. There are a few options to achieve this:

1) For Cloudant Enterprise customers, we rolled out an incremental replication backup feature that is details here https://docs.cloudant.com/backup-guide.html. This has its pros/cons, and being evaluated for its long term viability.

2) The best single source of backup options is at https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/2016/03/22/simple-couchdb-and-cloudant-backup/ which describes both database dumps and replication techniques for backing up your database. You can take the couchbackup technique a step further in the Bluemix ecosystem with https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/object-storage-cloudant-backup/. 

3) The Cloudant team is evaluating another technique for snapshot like local backups for quicker restore times as well. This is still in investigate mode and tracked at https://bigblue.aha.io/initiatives/6328361119403705833. If this doesn't prove viable we will most likely try to productize techniques described in #2 for cheaper backup options than are available in #1.