Incremental cloud snapshots

When Portworx takes and uploads backups for cloud snapshots (cloudsnaps), it first takes and uploads a full backup to your cloud provider. After the initial upload, Portworx uploads a series of incremental backups punctuated by an occasional full backup. By default, Portworx uploads a full backup every 7th cloud backup it performs. You can control the frequency with which Portworx uploads a full backup by configuring cluster options.

note

This is a cluster-wide setting.

View full backup frequency

You can view the currently set frequency by searching for it in the pxctl cluster options list output:

pxctl cluster options list | grep frequency

Cloudsnap full backup frequency                         : 7

Change full backup frequency

To modify the frequency with which Portworx uploads full backups for cloudsnaps, enter the following pxctl cluster options update command with the --cloudsnap-full-backup-frequency flag and a valid frequency range. The following example updates the frequency to every 4 cloudsnaps:

pxctl cluster options update --cloudsnap-full-backup-frequency 4

note

If you set the --cloudsnap-full-backup-frequency to a very high value, Portworx may take longer to restore your cloudsnaps, since there's a large number of incremental snapshot data to piece together before reaching a full backup. Additionally, these cloudsnaps may be larger, as they hold more incremental snapshots.

If you set the frequency to a very low value, Portworx will send full backups more often.