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In the following video I’ll explain how to take full and incremental backups of Neo4J instances that run in a managed Kubernetes environment. We’ll use additional pods to take remote backups and store the backup data on persistent volumes which are provided by our managed environment.

In case you’re wondering how to deploy Neo4J to managed Kubernetes, have a look at the previous posts that show examples for clusters and single core instances.

Try it yourself

You’ll find the Kubernetes resources in the following GitHub repository.

First, we create the persistent volume on which we store the backups later on:

This will create a volume claim for our backup volume, which is created by our storage provider. After a few moments we should have an additional persistent volume:

Now we can create our backup pod which remotely connects to our Neo4J instance, in my example the core-0 instance, to take a full backup.

If we have a look at the pods log output, we’ll see that it took a full backup of our Neo4J instance, similar to what’s shown in the video. The pod bound our backupdir- volume.

Now, if we remove the finished pod and create a new one, from the same YAML description, we’ll see that it will only take an incremental backup, since it will bind the same persistent volume and notice the existing backup.

The pod log output will show that now only an incremental backup has been taken.

For a more managed way to create these backup pods, you can use the following Kubernetes job, which will create a pod, similar to how a Kubernetes replica set manages its pods.