Cloud Pak for Data offline backup and restore (OADP utility)

You can create an offline backup of an entire IBM® Cloud Pak for Data deployment with the OpenShift® APIs for Data Protection (OADP) backup and restore utility.

You can back up and restore the Cloud Pak for Data control plane and services in two ways:

  1. If Cloud Pak for Data is installed on Ceph® Container Storage Interface (CSI) volumes, you can create volume snapshots.

    Snapshots are typically much faster than file copying, by using copy-on-write techniques to save changes instead of doing a full copy.

    CSI volume snapshots of the data are stored locally on the cluster. As a result, the OADP backup and restore utility can restore CSI snapshots only to the same cluster. To avoid data loss in the event of a disaster to the same cluster, consider the offline or online backup and restore to a different cluster options that Cloud Pak for Data supports.

    Note: Snapshots are associated with the storage from which they are produced, and might not provide any redundant safety. Therefore, it is a recommended best practice to periodically generate a complete copy either through a file system (Restic) backup or by duplicating snapshot contents at another location.
  2. You can create Restic backups on an S3-compatible object store.

    Restic is a file system copying technique that is used by OADP, based on the Restic open source project. Under OADP, Restic backups support producing backups only to S3-compatible object stores.

    Restic backups are different than the backups that are produced with the Cloud Pak for Data volume backup and restore utility. Like CSI snapshots, Velero with Restic are not just volume backups. Velero Restic backups copy both volume data and Kubernetes metadata.

    Restic backups work with any storage type. Use this method if you have Cloud Pak for Data services that use Portworx, OpenShift Data Foundation, and NFS (configured with no_root_squash).

Cloud Pak for Data is unavailable during offline backup and restore procedures. Cloud Pak for Data services are typically brought offline so that consistent backups are taken.

Offline backup and restore has the following features:

  • Restore to the same cluster or to a different cluster.
  • Backup and restore of multiple projects (namespaces).