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  1. Home
  2. Veritas NetBackup™ for MongoDB Administrator's Guide
  3. Backing up MongoDB using NetBackup
  4. Prerequisites for backing up a MongoDB cluster
Veritas NetBackup™ for MongoDB Administrator's Guide

Prerequisites for backing up a MongoDB cluster

  • NetBackup chooses the node in a MongoDB cluster to take a backup in the following order:

    • Active hidden node

    • Active secondary node

    • Active primary node

    If you want NetBackup to select a particular backup node in the MongoDB cluster, set it as a hidden node.

  • Before you run a backup job, ensure that you get a successful ping response from all the MongoDB nodes on the backup host. Check and update the firewall settings so that the backup hosts can communicate with the MongoDB cluster.

  • Ensure that the MongoDB cluster that you want to protect lets you take LVM snapshots.

  • Logical volume requirement for snapshot:

    • Ensure that the MongoDB database directory is mounted on a logical volume to complete the snapshot operations.

    • Use the vgdisplay command to ensure that the free physical extent size is sufficient in the logical volume group to complete the snapshot operations.

  • Renaming the volume group or the physical and logical volumes of the LVM for MongoDB database paths causes the backup to fail. If you rename the volume group or the physical and logical volumes of the LVM, ensure that the MongoDB database is mounted on the new path before taking a backup.

  • The backup shuts down the balancer on the mongos process and blocks all the other operations. Hence, during a backup process, ensure that you do not run any other operation that uses the mongos process. For example, import the database.

  • Always run a full backup when you make change to the database path, or modify the configuration file for the mongod or the mongos processes, or change the MongoDB topology.

  • If there are multiple MongoDB clients in a single Netbackup backup policy increase the Client read timeout parameter for master server, media server, and the client to ensure that the all the backups are successful.

    For more information, refer to the NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume I and the Timeouts properties section.

  • Incremental backup jobs use consistent backup images as a reference for determining the incremental changes. If the previous backup has failed, or was partially successful (failed for one of the nodes), it is skipped completely and a backup image prior to that is considered. In such cases, the backup operation can take longer and the image that is created might be of a larger size.

  • The oplog file has a capped or rolling cache and you can configure the size of the file. NetBackup uses oplog to capture incremental data. Oplog roll-over can cause the incremental backups to fail. To prevent this, make sure that oplog file size is sufficient to hold the incremental data that is generated between the incremental backups.

  • Ensure that the user that you have added using the tpconfig command has access to the entire MongoDB cluster and the custom folder paths that are specified in the mongodb.conf file.

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