CouchDB backups and cloning the database

Question

We\'re looking at CouchdDB for a CMS-ish application. What are some common patterns, best practices and workflow advice surrounding backing up our production database?

I

Answer 1

CouchDB also works very nicely with filesystem snapshots offered by modern filesystems like ZFS. Since the database file always is in a consistent state you can take the snapshot of the file any time without weakening the integrity guarantees provided by CouchDB.

This results in nearly no I/O overhead. In case you have e.g. accidentally deleted a document from the database you can move the snapshot to another machine and extract the missing data there. You might even be able to replicate back to the production database, but I never have tried that.

But always make sure you use exactly the same couchdb revisions when moving around database files. The on-disk format is still evolving in incompatible ways.