Hello community. I’m new to Influx DB and I think I have things running nicely. However, I’m unable to figure our how to do database backup WITHOUT the Gzip encoding of the tar files. I’ve looked at the help for the backup command and I don’t see an option to disable the GZIP compression. Here’s the command I’m using to backup the Influx server data:
influxd backup -portable -host ${INFLUXDB_HOST}:${INFLUXDB_PORT} “${OUTPUT_DIR}”
The backup command works fine, however I’d like to have backup files NOT Gzipped. Is there a secret option for this?
Compressing backups is desirable for space efficiency, since a fair amount of the time they are saved and not used again. What’s your need to save uncompressed backups for?
My backups are written to a dedupe appliance. When writing compressed data to dedupe appliance, dedupe is unable to dedupe the data because it’s compressed.
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Hi @Aaron_Newsome! I can confirm that it’s currently not possible to do the backup without Gzip’ing the resulting tar files. I created an issue in our GitHub repo for a feature request to allow for this: Allow for running a backup without gzip'ing the result in tar · Issue #21576 · influxdata/influxdb · GitHub
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Have you tried gunzipping the backup? (Or even using zcat and piping it into your destination? )
Well, the backup is a cronjob, the command:
influxd backup -portable -host ${INFLUXDB_HOST}:${INFLUXDB_PORT} “${OUTPUT_DIR}”
Is run as the actual cronjob. In order to pipe the results of the command to something that unzips the files means I’d have to use pipes in my cronjob (which I don’t like to do), or write a script that does the backup and unzips the file before writing to the file share. Also, not all the files are gzipped. The .meta and .manifest files are in plain text, so If I piped the backup result to an unzipper, I’d need to skip these files.
Really, it all just seems like something I shouldn’t need to do. I mean, in my opinion, the GZIP should be optional. I mean it’s great as a default since it will help out most folks and take up less disk space, but for anyone using a dedupe appliance, it’ll have just the opposite effect.
I also find it hard to believe that no one else is backup up databases to a dedupe appliance and sees the forced Gzip as a problem. I backup EVERYTHING to dedupe appliance, databases, virtual machine images, files, you name it. That’s what “global” dedupe is all about. Every other backup program, database dumper, command line tool, etc, … they all have an option for turning OFF the compression, zip, encryption or whatever for backup files.
In my opinion InfluxDB should too.
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Got it , makes much more sense with the full background.
