These tools replace the older gpcrondump and gpdbrestore utilities. A great feature for these newer tools is the ability to use S3 directly. This post will give a quick example on how to do this.

First, create a cluster and create a table to demonstrate the backup and restore.

psql -c "create table foo as select i from generate_series(1,1000000) as i distributed by (i);"

Next, create an s3_config.yaml file. You’ll need an Access key ID from AWS as well as the Secret Access key. This file should have the following:

executablepath: $GPHOME/bin/gpbackup_s3_plugin
options: 
  region: <your AWS region>
  aws_access_key_id: <your access key>
  aws_secret_access_key: <your secret access key>
  bucket: <S3 Bucket name>
  folder: <Path to store your backups in S3>

Next, you can execute a backup.

gpbackup --dbname gpadmin --plugin-config /home/gpadmin/s3_config.yaml 

Pretty simple, right?

To restore, you can follow these simple steps. (You will need to update the timestamp value for the backup you wish to restore.)

dropdb gpadmin
gprestore --plugin-config /home/gpadmin/s3_config.yaml --timestamp 20190823142028