Greenplum Incremental backup through gpbackup takes cummulative backup

Question

I am using greenplum DB's gpbackup utility to take incremental backup of database, through following commands

1: Full backup

gpbackup --dbname incdb --backup-dir /data/gpbackups --leaf-partition-data

2: Then I added some rows and took incremental backup as:

gpbackup --dbname incdb --backup-dir /data/gpbackups --leaf-partition-data --incremental

But when I go to the backup folder, unzip the backed up files and read them in terminal, I see incremental backup files have all the data from start, instead of only changed data. Shouldn't it have only the data added after the full backup?

Please also guide me if remote backups are possible through gpbackup utility?

Answer 1

You can find more details here, regarding the implementation of Greenplum's Incremental Backup

https://gpdb.docs.pivotal.io/backup-restore/1-16/admin_guide/managing/backup-gpbackup-incremental.html

In short, incremental backups work best on AO partitioned tables. gpbackup will identify which partitions of AO tables have data changes since the last full or incremental backup, and add those to the backup set.

Heap tables are always fully backed up, regardless of the incremental flag is used.

In your use case, were you using AO partitioned tables?