Milestone Release for Percona Backup for MongoDB Brings Physical Backups to the...

Milestone Release for Percona Backup for MongoDB Brings Physical Backups to the MongoDB Open Source Community

Although MongoDB has a very rigid high availability (HA) mechanism built in its core, automatic failover and data redundancy will not satisfy the security requirements of most enterprises. Not alone, at least.

Understanding the needs of the MongoDB community, Percona offers Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM) — a free to use and fully open source backup tool. The tool is fully functional with Percona Server for MongoDB, and has some features not available for the MongoDB Community Edition due to the lack of important enterprise features there. With that in mind, we highly recommend the free-to-use Percona Server for MongoDB, which offers you everything MongoDB Community Edition does and more.

While Percona provides free and open source tools, it’s important to remember that the company also offers premium services including top of the market consultants, managed services, support, and training. 

Backup and restore cut for larger data sets

Quite often we hear from our users that physical backups and restores are what they need. Logical dumps – the main backup tool available for MongoDB Community Edition – simply does not cut it for large data sets. Starting with Percona Backup for MongoDB 2.0.0, we are happy to announce that physical backups and restores are generally available and ready for production use. 

What’s important, with the data at rest encryption supported for physical backups and restores, you are safe to use these with private data in production environments and still be compliant with data security requirements driven by privacy standards like HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, CCPA or others required in your organization!

Recovery does not have to mean a full database!

Having a built-in redundancy in the form of replica sets makes full restores obsolete to some degree. Of course not totally obsolete, as it is still being covered end to end for any situation requiring such capability, and it’s still a very convenient way of cloning databases.

These days when I think about backups for MongoDB more and more it’s the human error that I want to be protected against. In case no errors were made during the database architecture design and multiple availability zones are assigned to every replica set, then it’s the human who can wreak havoc in a whole database or a single collection. 

While hurting the database to the point of doing a full recovery may not be a very probable scenario, the selective restore of a particular collection is what our users need. That’s why with PBM 2.0.0, selective backups and restores become available as a tech preview.

What tech preview means is (following our lifecycle page): 

*Tech Preview Features: RC/GA releases can include features that are not yet ready for enterprise use and are not included in support via SLA (supported by product/engineering on the best effort basis). These features will be fully documented and described as a tech preview so that customers can provide feedback prior to the full release of the feature in a future GA release (or removal of the feature is deemed not useful). This functionality can change (APIs, CLIs, etc.) from tech preview to GA, however, there is no guarantee of compatibility between different tech preview versions.

What this means to the Community of users is that you have a voice whether this is a feature you need and whether it’s in a shape you like. Please share your feedback with us and know that every voice counts!

What’s next

What’s good about open source software is that the messaging is more honest, transparent and to the point. So in the spirit of open communication, we have to point out that PBM 2.0.0 has come out with some limitations that we are determined to lift in order to deliver better coverage and experience across the product. Our main focus right now is around the:

• Point in time recovery based on physical backups
• Selective restores supporting sharding

You can also expect more integration with the freely available Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) in the form of backup management and monitoring available from PMM.

As you are reading this blogpost a new patch release has come out, with PBM 2.0.1 we added some slight improvements and bugfixes. This tool is fully supported and we are determined to deliver fixes and new features to everyone in the spirit of true open-source, not only to our customers paying for premium support.