Backups for RethinkDB

General information on backup schedules and downloading your backups can be found on the Backups page. This includes information on restoring a RethinkDB backup into a new Compose deployment and downloading your backup files.

You may also manage your RethinkDB backups with the Compose API.

How RethinkDB Backups Are Made

RethinkDB backups use the dump command from the RethinkDB command-line utility on your running database cluster to backup your entire deployment. It saves database and table contents as well as metadata. dump does use some cluster resources, but will not lock-out your clients and can be run on a live cluster. Compose provides backups for RethinkDB deployments that are in a format that rethinkdb restore can use directly.

For more information on the dump and restore commands, see the RethinkDB docs.

Restoring a Backup Locally

Since your RethinkDB backups are available for you to download, you can get a local instance of your deployment up and running. To do so, you need to install rethink. Download the compressed backup file from your Compose deployment. You do not need to unpack the backup archive file, the RethinkDB tools know how to handle it.

To spin up RethinkDB, run the rethinkdb command in one terminal window, and in a separate terminal window, navigate to the location of your downloaded backup and run rethinkdb restore backup.tar.gz. If you bring up a browser and navigate to locahost:8080 you should see the RethinkDB UI and all of your data.

Bringing a Local Backup into Compose

If you have a backup file locally that you would like to restore to a Compose deployment (either from another Compose instance or a local instance) you may do so using rethinkdb restore.

Either way, you need to install rethink. You will also need to download the certificate from the Compose UI and save it as compose.cert. To restore you'd use:
rethinkdb restore -c <host>:<port> --tls-cert compose.cert -p backup.tar.gz

The host and port are those found under RethinkDB Proxy Connection strings in the Compose UI. The -p will prompt for the Authentication Credential.
Note that if you are restoring into an existing deployment you may have to use --force to overwrite existing tables.

When you log into the Compose UI and your RethinkDB deployment you should be able to access your data.

Still Need Help?

If this article didn't solve things, summon a human and get some help!