Thanks for the feedback.

Our DEV team has built a MirrorMaker-like process that mirrors all topics 
between two DCs. It is basically separate consumer/producer process that 
shovels data from DC A to DC B between two separate Kafka clusters.So in 
essence we have a replication factor of 6 (3 replicas in each DC). I guess I 
just need to get over my paranoia :)

Gene Robichaux
Manager, Database Operations
Match.com
8300 Douglas Avenue I Suite 800 I Dallas, TX  75225

-----Original Message-----
From: Gwen Shapira [mailto:gshap...@cloudera.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 12:39 AM
To: users@kafka.apache.org
Subject: Re: Backups

Hi,

As a former DBA, I hear you on backups :)

Technically, you could copy all log.dir files somewhere safe occasionally. I'm 
pretty sure we don't guarantee the consistency or safety of this copy. You 
could find yourself with a corrupt "backup"
by copying files that are either in the middle of getting written or are 
inconsistent in time with other files. Kafka doesn't have a good way to stop 
writing to files for long enough to allow copying them safely.

Unlike traditional backups, there's no transaction log that can be rolled to 
move a disk copy forward in time (or that can be used when data files are 
locked for backups). In Kafka, the files *are* the transaction log and you roll 
back in time by deciding which offsets to read.

DR is possible using MirrorMaker though, since the only thing better than 
replication is... more replication!
So you could create a non-corrupt file copy by stopping a MirrorMaker replica 
occasionally and copying all files somewhere safe.

If it helps you sleep better at night :) Typically having kafka nodes on 
multiple racks and a DR in another data center is considered pretty safe.

Gwen

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Gene Robichaux <gene.robich...@match.com> 
wrote:
> Does anyone have any thoughts on Kafka broker backups?
>
> All of our topics have a replication factor of 3. However I just want to know 
> if anyone does anything about traditional backups. My background is Ops DBA, 
> so I have a special place in my heart for backups.
>
>
> Gene Robichaux
> Manager, Database Operations
> Match.com
> 8300 Douglas Avenue I Suite 800 I Dallas, TX  75225
>

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