How can I back up and restore data from a Riak cluster?

First, on each machine, you need to know a valid node name and the Erlang cookie value.

You can find out what nodes you have by running riak-admin status | grep 'nodename'

You can find the cookie name in vm.args. For me, this file was located in /usr/local/riak/etc/. There should be a line like "-setcookie foo`. The default value is 'riak'.

On the machine where you want to do the backup, run (from the docs):

sudo riak-admin backup <node> <cookie> <filename> [[node|all]]

For example:

sudo riak-admin backup [email protected] MyCookieVal /home/me/riak-backup-01-11-2012.dat all

(The .dat file extension is arbitrary.)

Note that you can run this command remotely if the machine you're running it from has riak-admin available.

On the machine where you want to do the restore, run (from the docs):

riak-admin restore <node> <cookie> <filename>

For example:

riak-admin restore [email protected] MyCookieVal ~/riak-production-backup-01-11-2012.dat