Appendix C. Snapshot Utilities

VoltDB provides three utilities for managing snapshot files. These utilities verify that a native snapshot is complete and usable, convert the snapshot contents to a text representation that can be useful for uploading or reloading data in case of severe errors, and send a copy of the latest snapshot to external storage for backup, archiving, or additional processing.

It is possible, as the result of a design flaw or failed program logic, for a database application to become unusable. However, the data is still of value. In such emergency cases, it is desirable to extract the data from the database and possibly reload it. This is the function that save and restore perform within VoltDB.

But there may be cases when you want to use the data created by a VoltDB snapshot elsewhere. The goal of the utilities is to assist in that process. The snapshot utilities are:

To use the snapshotconvert, snapshottransfer and snapshotverifier commands, be sure that the voltdb /bin directory is in your PATH, as described in the section on "Setting Up Your Environment" in the Using VoltDB manual. The following sections describe how to use these three commands.