Backups and recovery

GrapheneDB offers daily and on-demand backups. All backups are retained for a week and are available as downloadable tarballs.

Before making the backup available, GrapheneDB performs a consistency check to make sure everything is well with your data store.

Once the backup is completed, GrapheneDB offers the following alternatives:

• Download backup to your local machine
• In-place restore backup into your current database
• Restore backup into a new database

Creating backups

To access your backups, please navigate to the Backups tab of your GrapheneDB database management area.

There are two different ways of taking a backup on GrapheneDB. One is the automatic backup, which will start automatically after the database is created. The other one is by taking a manual snapshot.

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Don’t worry, we won’t stop your database to perform a scheduled backup or a manual snapshot. There is no downtime involved in the operation.

Automatic backup schedule

If your plan features backups, GrapheneDB will automatically take a snapshot of your database every 24 hours.

You can change the time when the backup is taken by navigating to the Backups tab of your database management area and clicking on the Change link next to the current time info.

Take manual snapshot

You can also take a manual snapshot whenever you need it. To do this, navigate to the Backups tab of your database management area and click on the Take snapshot now button.

You will see at the top of the backups history a new entry with the new backup state.

Retention policy

Backups are kept for 1 week after they are created.

Accessing backups

All completed backups will appear as a new row in your backups history list, ordered by date. Additionally, you’ll find the size of the backup and type (manual or scheduled).

If you want to download a specific backup, you just have to click on the download link on the right side of the row. A compressed file will be automatically downloaded to your local machine.

Once you have downloaded the file, you’ll need to extract and decompress the contents into your desired directory using the following command:

$ tar -xvf myfilename.tgz

Restoring backups

Restore database from backup

You can easily restore your database from a backup. To do this, just navigate to the Backups tab of your database management area, find the backup you want to restore to (snapshot date is shown) and click on the Restore link.

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Keep in mind

Restoring your database from a backup will replace the data set of your database with the the backup. This action can’t be undone.

Create a new database from backup

Sometimes it is useful to create a new database from a stored backup, for example, to migrate to a new database with different configuration.

Creating a new database from a backup is similar to creating a brand new database. To do this, navigate to the Backups tab and click on Create DB from backup. A form will appear (similar to the ‘create a new database’ form), where you can select the database and backup you want to use.

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Note

Neo4j versions lower than the selected database will be disabled to ensure compatibility.