Back up and Restore Data Using Commands

Milvus Backup provides data backup and restoration features to ensure the security of your Milvus data.

Obtain Milvus Backup

You can either download the compiled binary or build from the source.

To download the compiled binary, go to the release page, where you can find all official releases. Remember, always use the binaries in the release marked as Latest.

To compile from the source, do as follows:

git clone git@github.com:zilliztech/milvus-backup.git
go get
go build

Prepare configuration file

Download the example configuration file and tailor it to fit your needs.

Then create a folder alongside the downloaded or built Milvus Backup binary, name the folder configs, and place the configuration file inside the configs folder.

Your folder structure should be similar to the following:

workspace
├── milvus-backup
└── configs
     └── backup.yaml

Because Milvus Backup cannot back up your data to a local path, ensure that Minio settings are correct when tailoring the configuration file.

Prepare data

If you run an empty local Milvus instance at the default port, use the example Python scripts to generate some data in your instance. Feel free to make necessary changes to the scripts to fit your needs.

Obtain the scripts. Then run the scripts to generate the data. Ensure that PyMilvus, the official Milvus Python SDK, has been installed.

python example/prepare_data.py

This step is optional. If you skip this, ensure that you already have some data in your Milvus instance.

Back up data

Note that running Milvus Backup against a Milvus instance will not normally affect the running of the instance. Your Milvus instance is fully functional during backup or restore.

Run the following command to create a backup.

./milvus-backup create -n <backup_name>

Once the command is executed, you can check the backup files in the bucket specified in the Minio settings. Specifically, you can download them using Minio Console or the mc client.

To download from Minio Console, log into Minio Console, locate the bucket specified in minio.address, select the files in the bucket, and click Download to download them.

If you prefer the mc client, do as follows:

# configure a Minio host
mc alias set my_minio https://<minio_endpoint> <accessKey> <secretKey>

# List the available buckets
mc ls my_minio

# Download a bucket recursively
mc cp --recursive my_minio/<your-bucket-path> <local_dir_path>

Now, you can save the backup files to a safe place for restoration in the future, or upload them to Zilliz Cloud to create a managed vector database with your data. For details, refer to Migrate from Milvus to Zilliz Cloud.

Restore data

You can run the restore command with the -s flag to create a new collection by restoring the data from the backup:

./milvus-backup restore -n my_backup -s _recover

The -s flag allows you to set a suffix for the new collection to be created. The above command will create a new collection called hello_milvus_recover in your Milvus instance.

If you prefer to restore the backed-up collection without changing its name, drop the collection before restoring it from the backup. You can now clean the data generated in Prepare data by running the following command.

python example/clean_data.py

Then run the following command to restore the data from the backup.

./milvus-backup restore -n my_backup

Verify restored data

Once the restore completes, you can verify the restored data by indexing the restored collection as follows:

python example/verify_data.py

Note that the above script assumes that you have run the restore command with the -s flag and the suffix is set to -recover. Feel free to make necessary changes to the script to fit your need.