Couchbase Backup and Restore

cbbackupmgr is the primary tool for backing up and restoring Couchbase clusters. It uses incremental backups by default, minimizing transfer time and storage.

Hardware minimum: 4 CPU cores, 8 GiB RAM. Recommended: 16 cores, 16 GiB RAM, SSD.

Core Concepts

Archive: top-level directory containing one or more backup repositories and a logs/ folder.

Repository: a directory inside the archive that holds the backup configuration and all backup snapshots for a specific cluster. Typically one repository per cluster.

Backup snapshot: a timestamped folder inside the repository created by each backup run. Incremental — only data changed since the last snapshot is stored.