Couchbase Incremental Backup using cbbackup

I would like to have a secure backup of my couchbase configuration using tarsnap. At the moment I am running cbbackup and then deleting the destination between every hourly backup. To reduce the cost of the backup transfers I would prefer to perform an incremental backup so that much of the historic data isn’t changed between each backup. Is this possible?

The documentation states “The directory that you specify for the backup should either not exist, or exist and be empty with no other files. If the directory does not exist, it will be created, but only if the parent directory already exists.”

So it seems as though cbbackup can’t update an existing backup with only the new or updated data from the cluster. Will there be any changes to this or an alternate solution to overcome this? Any plans on the roadmap (v3.0) regarding this?

The documentation at http://docs.couchbase.com/couchbase-manual-2.5/cb-cli/#deprecated-and-removed-tools also states that mbbackup-incremental did exist at one stage with the note, “Deprecated in 1.8, replaced by cbbackup-incremental” I assume that is an error in the documentation as this CLI tool doesn’t seem to exist.

Unfortunately incremental back-ups are not yet possible in Couchbase.

However, that feature is targeted for Couchbase 3.0:

http://www.couchbase.com/issues/browse/MB-10176

I’ll look at getting that documentation page corrected. Thanks for reporting it.