Backup

Provides an interface for database backup and restore management, scheduling, and reporting. Each backup is assigned with a backup ID and ClusterControl creates a directory under Storage Directory to store the backups based on this ID.

Create Backup

Creates or schedules a MongoDB backup.

Create Backup

Creates a backup of the database immediately. You can choose to create a full backup using mongodump or Percona Backup for MongoDB(PBM). The backup created by this feature will be a full backup.

Schedule Backup

Creates backup schedules of the database. You can choose to create a full backup using mongodump or Percona Backup for MongoDB. ClusterControl organizes the backup directory according to the shard or replica set, under the Backup Directory on the ClusterControl host.

Backup Method

This section explains the backup method used by ClusterControl for MongoDB.

mongodump

ClusterControl uses the standard command to perform mongodump with --journal, which allows mongodump operations to use the durability journal to ensure that the export is in a consistent state against shards.

mongodb consistent

Built on top of Python 2.7, also known as mongodb-consistent-backup, it creates cluster-consistent point-in-time backups of MongoDB via wrapping mongodump. Backups are remotely pulled and outputted onto the host running the tool. Even if you do not run MongoDB 3.2+, it is strongly recommended to use MongoDB 3.2+ binaries due to inline compression and parallelism.

Percona Backup for MongoDB

Percona Backup for MongoDB is a distributed, low-impact solution for achieving consistent backups of MongoDB sharded clusters and replica sets. Percona Backup for MongoDB supports Percona Server for MongoDB and MongoDB Community v3.6 or higher with MongoDB Replication enabled (standalone is not supported due to the dependency on MongoDB’s oplog). The Percona Backup for MongoDB project inherited from and replaces mongodb-consistent-backup, which is no longer actively developed or supported.

If you have older versions of MongoDB i.e. < 3.6 versions, then your only option to take a backup is mongodump.

 

 

Backup List

Provides a list of finished backup jobs. The status can be:

Backup Encryption and Decryption

If the encryption option is enabled for a particular backup, ClusterControl will use OpenSSL to encrypt the backup using the AES-256 CBC algorithm. Encryption happens on the backup node. If you choose to store the backup on the controller node, the backup files are streamed over in encrypted format through socat or netcat.

If compression is enabled, the backup is first compressed and then encrypted resulting in smaller backup sizes. The encryption key will be generated automatically (if not exists) and stored inside the CMON configuration for the particular cluster under backup_encryption_key the option. This key is stored with base64 encoded and should be decoded first before using it as an argument to pass when decrypting the backup. The following command shows how to decode the key:

$ cat /etc/cmon.d/cmon_X.cnf | grep ^backup_encryption_key | cut -d"'" -f2 | base64 -d > keyfile.key

Where X is the cluster-ID. The above command will read the backup_encryption_key value and decode the value to a binary output. Thus, it is important to redirect the output to a file, as in the example, we redirected the output to keyfile.key. The key file which stores the actual encryption key can be used in the OpenSSL command to decrypt the backup, for example:

$ cat {BACKUPFILE}.aes256 | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -pass file:/path/to/keyfile.key > backup_file.gz

Or, you can pass the stdin to the respective restore command chain, for example:

$ cat cat {BACKUPFILE}.aes256 | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -pass file:/path/to/keyfile.key | /usr/bin/mongorestore --host localhost --port 27017 --username backupuser --password mysecret --authenticationDatabase admin --drop --oplogReplay --gzip --archive

Settings

Upon clicking the Settings tab button, two options you can choose are Backup Settings and Percona Backup.

Backup Settings

Manages the backup settings

Percona Backup

Manages the Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM) installation and configuration.

Clicking on the “Actions” button will list down all the possible functionalities.

The dashboard displays the Hostname, Status of the pbm-agent (the backup agent that was deployed and running in your MongoDB nodes), Version of the PBM installed, and Last Seen when it was running.