Database managementBackup and restore

Backup and restore

Memgraph uses snapshots and WAL to ensure the durability of the stored data. Learn how to safely backup and restore your data.

Create backup

Follow these steps to create database backup:

Create a snapshot

If necessary, create a snapshot of the current database state by running the following query in mgconsole or Memgraph Lab:

CREATE SNAPSHOT;

The snapshot is saved in the snapshots directory of the data directory (/var/lib/memgraph).

Lock the data directory

Durability files are deleted when an event is triggered, for example, exceeding the maximum number of snapshots.

To disable this behavior, run the following query in mgconsole or Memgraph Lab:

LOCK DATA DIRECTORY;

Copy files

Copy snapshot files (from the snapshots directory) and any additional WAL files (from the wal directory) to a backup location.

If you’ve just created a snapshot file there is no need to backup WAL files.

To copy the snapshot files from the Docker container first check the container ID by running docker ps then run the following command:

 docker cp  <CONTAINER ID>:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots/<snapshot_file> <snapshot_file>

Unlock the data directory

Run the following query in mgconsole or Memgraph Lab to unlock the directory:

UNLOCK DATA DIRECTORY;

Memgraph will delete the files which should have been deleted before locking and allow any future deletion of the durability files.

Restore data

To restore a snapshot in Memgraph, run the following command from an already running instance:

RECOVER SNAPSHOT "/path/to/snapshot";

By default, snapshots are stored in the local directory:
/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots/

If your snapshot is stored elsewhere, Memgraph will attempt to copy it to the local snapshot directory. Ensure the file has the necessary permissions to be moved. If not, you might encounter the following error:

Failed to copy snapshot over to local snapshots directory.

Use an absolute path when specifying the snapshot location. If you provide a relative path, it must be relative to the Memgraph execution path.

Before modifying the local data directory, Memgraph will move all existing WALs and snapshots to a hidden directory in the format:
.old_<time-since-epoch>

If the instance is not freshly started, add the FORCE flag to your command:

RECOVER SNAPSHOT "/path/to/snapshot" FORCE;

This will clear all existing data before applying the snapshot.

In order to query the snapshots currently present in the local data directory, execute the query:

SHOW SNAPSHOTS;

Its results contain the path to the file, the logical timestamp, the physical timestamp and the file size.

As of Memgraph v3.5, the SHOW SNAPSHOTS query does not return information regarding the next scheduled snapshot. A special query has been added:

SHOW NEXT SNAPSHOT;

If the periodic snapshot background job is active, the result will return the path and the time at which the snapshots will be created.

If you are using Memgraph pre v2.22, follow these steps to restore data from a backup:

Empty the `wal` directory

If you want to restore data only from the snapshot file, ensure that the wal directory is empty:

  1. Find the container ID using a docker ps command, then enter the container using:
docker exec -it CONTAINER_ID bash
  1. Position yourself in the /var/lib/memgraph/wal directory and rm *

Stop the instance

Run the following command

docker stop CONTAINER_ID

Start the instance

You can start the instance with the backed up files in two ways.

Option 1

You can start the instance by adding a -v ~/snapshots:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots flag to the docker run command, where the ~/snapshots represents a path to the location of the directory with the back-up snapshot, for example:

docker run -p 7687:7687 -p 7444:7444 -v ~/snapshots:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots memgraph/memgraph

If you want to copy both WAL and snapshot files start the instance by adding a -v ~/snapshots:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots -v ~/wal:/var/lib/memgraph/wal flags to the docker run command, where the ~/snapshots represents a path to the location of the backed-up snapshot directory, and ~/wal represents a path to the location of the backed-up wal directory for example:

docker run -p 7687:7687 -p 7444:7444 -v ~/snapshots:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots -v ~/wal:/var/lib/memgraph/wal memgraph/memgraph

Option 2

The other option is to copy the backed-up snapshot file into the snapshots directory after creating the container and start the database. So the commands should look like this:

docker create -p 7687:7687 -p 7444:7444 -v `snapshots`:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots --name memgraphDB memgraph/memgraph
tar -cf - sample_snapshot_file | docker cp -a - memgraphDB:/var/lib/memgraph/snapshots

The sample_snapshot_file is the snapshot file you want to use to restore the data. Due to the nature of Docker file ownership, you need to use tar to copy the file as STDIN into the non-running container. It will allow you to change the ownership of the file to the memgraph user inside the container.

After that, start the database with:

docker start -a memgraphDB

The -a flag is used to attach to the container’s output so you can see the logs.

Once memgraph is started, change the snapshot directory ownership to the memgraph user by running the following command:

docker exec -it -u 0 memgraphDB bash -c "chown memgraph:memgraph /var/lib/memgraph/snapshots"

Otherwise, Memgraph will not be able to write the future snapshot files and will fail.

Database dump

The database dump contains a record of the database state in the form of Cypher queries. It’s equivalent to the SQL dump in relational DBs. Database dump preserves nodes, relationships, indexes, constraints and triggers.

You can run the queries constituting the dump to recreate the state of the DB as it was at the time of the dump.

To dump the Memgraph DB, run the following query:

DUMP DATABASE;

If you are using Memgraph Lab, you can dump the database, that is, the queries to recreate it, to a CYPHERL file in the Import & Export section of the Lab.

Storage modes

Memgraph has the option to work in IN_MEMORY_ANALYTICAL, IN_MEMORY_TRANSACTIONAL or ON_DISK_TRANSACTIONAL storage modes.

Memgraph always starts in the IN_MEMORY_TRANSACTIONAL mode in which it creates periodic snapshots and write-ahead logging as durability mechanisms, and also enables creating manual snapshots.

In the IN_MEMORY_ANALYTICAL mode, Memgraph offers no periodic snapshots and write-ahead logging. Users can create a snapshot with the CREATE SNAPSHOT; Cypher query. During the process of snapshot creation, other transactions will be prevented from starting until the snapshot creation is completed.

In the ON_DISK_TRANSACTIONAL mode, durability is supported by RocksDB since it keeps its own WAL files. Memgraph persists the metadata used in the implementation of the on-disk storage.

Backup in multi-tenancy Enterprise

When running Memgraph with multi-tenancy, every database other than the default database (named memgraph) will have its own associated database UUID. Database UUID can be inspected by running the SHOW STORAGE INFO command and reading the value under the database_uuid key. The default data directory location for a specific database is /var/lib/memgraph/<database_uuid>/. The default database memgraph does not follow this directory structure and the data files are directly located under /var/lib/memgraph.

Manual snapshot backup flow should look like this:

Create snapshots inside Memgraph

Create snapshot for every database (or let it create automatically with periodic snapshot execution inside Memgraph)

Perform backup

Backup the snapshot for every database into a 3rd party location. Currently, you’re encouraged to perform the backup mechanisms by yourself with tools such as rclone.

When performing recovery, copy the snapshot to Memgraph

When recovering a specific database, copy the snapshot to any data location

  • if the data directory the snapshot is being copied to is a location that’s outside the database directory, ensure the snapshot has the permissions to be copied to the database data directory
  • if the data directory the snapshot is being copied to is a location that’s inside the database directory, there should be no issues with permissions as there is no copying being performed from source to target directory location

Position to specific database

Position the database driver interacting with Memgraph into the database using USE DATABASE <database_name>

Recover the snapshot

Execute RECOVER SNAPSHOT <path_to_snapshot> FORCE

Best practices

Memgraph can optimize restoring of snapshots in a multi-threaded manner. To enable multi-threaded restoration of a snapshot, you need to ensure the following flags are present:

  • --storage-parallel-schema-recovery=true
  • --storage-recovery-thread-count=<number_of_cores> where number_of_cores is the amount of CPU cores to parallelize the restoration process
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