Backing up and restoring Apache HBase datasets

Backup-and-restore is a standard set of operations for many databases. An effective backup-and-restore strategy helps ensure that you can recover data in case of data loss or failures. The HBase backup-and-restore utility helps ensure that enterprises using HBase as a data repository can recover from these types of incidents. Another important feature of the backup-and-restore utility is the ability to restore the database to a particular point-in-time, commonly referred to as a snapshot.

The HBase backup-and-restore utility features both full backups and incremental backups. A full backup is required at least once. The full backup is the foundation on which incremental backups are applied to build iterative snapshots. Incremental backups can be run on a schedule to capture changes over time, for example by using a Cron job. Incremental backup is more cost effective because it only captures the changes. It also enables you to restore the database to any incremental backup version. Furthermore,the utilities also enable table-level data backup-and-recovery if you do not want to restore the entire dataset of the backup.