Enterprise Server Backup

This page will walk you through the main steps required to manually back up and restore the state of a Pachyderm cluster in production. Details on how to perform those steps might vary depending on your infrastructure and cloud provider / on-premises setup. Refer to your provider’s documentation.

Before You Start #

Pachyderm state is stored in two main places:

An object-store holding Pachyderm’s data.
A PostgreSQL instance made up of one or two databases:
- pachyderm holding Pachyderm’s metadata
- dex holding authentication data

Backing up a Pachyderm cluster involves snapshotting both the object store and the PostgreSQL database(s), in a consistent state, at a given point in time. Restoring a cluster involves re-populating the database(s) and the object store using those backups, then recreating a Pachyderm cluster.

Back Up A Standalone Enterprise Server #

Backing up and restoring an Enterprise Server is similar to the backing up and restoring of a regular cluster, with three slight variations:

The name of its Kubernetes deployment is pach-enterprise versus pachd in the case of a regular cluster.
The Enterprise Server does not use an Object Store.
An Enterprise server only requires a dex database.

Warning

Make sure that pachctl and kubectl are pointing to the right cluster. Check your Enterprise Server context: pachctl config get active-enterprise-context, or pachctl config set active-enterprise-context <my-enterprise-context-name> --overwrite to set it.
- Pause the Enterprise Server like you would pause a regular cluster by running pachctl enterprise pause (Enterprise users), or using kubectl.
- As a reminder, the Enterprise Server does not use any object-store. Therefore, the backup of the Enterprise Server only consists in backing up the database dex.
- Resume the operations on your Enterprise Server by running pachctl enterprise unpause (Enterprise users) to scale the pach-enterprise deployment back up. Alternatively, if you used kubectl, run:
```
kubectl scale deployment pach-enterprise --replicas 1
```

Restore An Enterprise Server #

Follow the standard restoration steps while skipping all tasks related to creating and populating a new object-store.
Once your cluster is up and running, check that all your clusters are automatically registered with your new Enterprise Server.

Considerations #

kubectl users #

There is a difference with the pause of a regular cluster. The deployment of the enterprise server is named pach-enterprise; therefore, the first command should be:

kubectl scale deployment pach-enterprise --replicas 0

There is no need to pause all the Pachyderm clusters registered to the Enterprise Server to backup the enterprise server; however, pausing the Enterprise server will result in your clusters becoming unavailable.