Backup Master-DB

Objective

Perform a backup of a Master-DB Server. 

Background

Backups of a Master-DB are saved as EBS snapshots. So if you're using an EBS stripe (i.e. more than one EBS Volume), you will have a set of EBS Snapshots that will be tagged accordingly.

When a backup of the Master-DB is completed, a new set of snapshots (depending on the size of the EBS stripe) will be created and named according to the DB_LINEAGE_NAME input variable.  The name for each snapshot will have the date appended to the specified lineage name prefix.  For example, if DB_LINEAGE_NAME = mydb, a resulting snapshot name would look something like 'mydb-master-201109081143'.  Times are in UTC format (by default or as specified in the input variable OPT_TZINFO).   This format will help you sort and locate the times of the existing snapshots.

Since backups are done via EBS snapshots the operation can be completed very quickly.  However, the snapshots themselves will not be available for creating volumes until they are 100% complete. The time for a snapshot to become 100% complete will vary widely depending on the size of the EBS volume and the total number of changes to the EBS volume since the last snapshot was taken.

Steps

1. Go to your Deployment (Manage -> Deployments).
2. Click the nickname of the Master-DB instance.
3. Under the Server's Scripts tab, run the DB EBS backup operational script. (Snapshots will be taken of the Master-DB's EBS stripe.)
4. Wait for all of the snapshots of the new Master-DB to be 100% complete before launching any new slave instances.  To check the status of your EBS snapshots, go to Clouds -> AWS Region -> EBS Snapshots and filter by the DB_LINEAGE_NAME.

What feedback to expect

The Events pane will highlight the progress of the operation.  Click on the name of an action in the pane to view a detailed output of the action that can be used to troubleshoot the cause of a failure, if necessary.