Hi again all, We have a relatively full featured backup solution in master branch. It looks like the original development had intended to be included in branch-2 [1], but did not make the deadline for 2.0.0 release and was removed [2]. Later the idea of backporting was forgotten, potentially with some of the main devs moving onto other projects.
In the interim, one company, Flipkart (Mallikarjun works there), took it upon themselves to backport the feature to their own fork. They've been running that backport in production for some time now. Mallikarjun has been trying to contribute some improvements, but has lacked committer support. At my company, we're considering redesigning our backup/restore solution which has been relatively static since originally built back in 2014 and is showing its age. While investigating options, I reached out to Mallikarjun and he was graciously willing to provide a backport PR [3]. The backport applied cleanly with small conflicts in one file. There were a few blockers listed in the original thread in [1] and from what I can tell, they are all done. There is a remaining "Phase 4" umbrella [4] with all of the issues looking like nice-to-haves. Most could just be tackled based on community interest. I think a big reason why there is no committer support and relatively little uptake on this feature is because it has for years been stuck on master, when pretty much everyone runs a 2.x release. So no one is using it or has the ability to test it out, outside flipkart who backported it themselves. We are currently evaluating the backport PR in our own fork to see if the solution as-is can be a good foundation for what we're trying to accomplish. If the evaluation works out and we decide to move forward, I'd like to work with Mallikarjun to get his backport committed. Before doing that, I wanted to check if any other devs have concerns about this initiative given the size of the patch and history of the project. Let me know what you think. [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/k9dx12rj58r1qbrxqb0s1306lhhg3grn [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-19407 [3] https://github.com/apache/hbase/pull/4770 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-17362
