Environment

• YugabyteDB Anywhere 2.16 and later - Incremental backups

Issue

• When running an incremental backup, the size of each increment can vary by a large amount.

Resolution

Overview

The size of Incremental backups run from YBA can vary vastly depending on what has occurred in the universe.

Files that have changed on the node will be backed up in the next incremental backup. Unchanged files will not be backed up.

On a seemingly idle universe, several events can affect the size of the incremental backup.

Some examples are:

• compaction
• tablet leader change
  • node restart
  • rolling restart
  • universe pause
  • network partition

All Incremental backups are linked to a Full Backup.

Deletion of the Full Backup will delete all Incremental backups that are based on it.

Each new Full Backup has the subsequent Incremental backups associated with it until a further Full Backup has been completed successfully.

The backup documentation states:

Incremental backups are taken on top of a complete backup.

To reduce the length of time spent on each backup, only SST files that are new to YugabyteDB and not present in the previous backups are incrementally backed up. For example, in most cases, for incremental backups occurring every hour, the 1-hour delta would be significantly smaller compared to the complete backup.

Additional Information

Documentation:

Incremental backups