Configure periodic backups

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Overview

Explains what the feature is or what its benefits are to the user or customer.

Feature

You can configure ThoughtSpot to take backups for you automatically at specified times you define, following crontab format. Old backups are discarded automatically, using FIFO (first in, first out).

Periodic backup takes a full, lightweight, or dataless backup of the cluster. It goes through the same steps as creating a backup manually, first taking a snapshot and then pulling it out into a backup on disk. Make sure you have adequate space to store the number of backups you want to archive. You can mount a NAS (network attached storage) file system to hold the periodic backups.

When choosing times and frequencies for periodic backups, you should choose a reasonable frequency. Do not schedule backups too close together, since a backup cannot start when another backup is still running. Avoid backing up when the system is experiencing a heavy load, such as peak usage or a large data load.

When choosing the number of backups to store, keep in mind that there is no automatic checking to validate that a backup is valid for restoring a cluster. When the maximum number of backups has been reached, the next backup operation deletes the oldest stored backup and the corresponding snapshot before starting the new backup. This means that if you set the number of backups to one, that backup will be deleted before a new backup can be taken. For this reason, you should always set the number of backups to be greater than two, to ensure you have at least one backup available in the case of a failure while taking a backup. It is recommended to keep as many backups as you can reasonably store, to ensure you have a good backup available if you need to restore a cluster.

To configure periodic backups:

Log in to the Linux shell using SSH.
Find a directory with enough disk space to hold the number of backups you want to archive.
Hint: You can use df -h to see free disk space and tscli snapshot ls to view existing snapshots and their size on disk.
Use the tscli backup set-periodic command to set the times to back up, directory to store backups, and number of backups to archive.
This example sets lightweight backups to occur at 1:00am and 9:00pm, designates /export/backups as the directory and will archive a maximum of 5 backups:
```
$ tscli backup set-periodic --at 01,21 --directory /export/backups --num_backups 5 --mode light
```
If you want to set the time to fall between the hour, e.g. 9:30pm, you can use a command which is available by contacting ThoughtSpot Support.
After setting up the backup configurations, use tscli backup periodic-config to check that it is ready.
You can also run tscli backup periodic-status at any time to check whether the periodic backup is running fine. The command will provide information on the latest periodic backup and when it was created.
Use tscli backup disable-periodic to turn off the periodic backup.