Configure periodic backups
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: