Raft backups in HA Storage

Vault
1

Hi Everyone,

We are looking to migrate from Consul to Raft storage in our Vault instances. Reading through the documentation, and this list, it sounds like the proper way to perform raft backups is using the vault operator raft snapshot command, however I noticed the documentation states “Snapshot is not supported when Raft is used for ha_storage”.

Is there a recommended way to do these types of backups when using Raft for ha_storage? Initial tests indicate that the snapshots work fine, even when restoring to a new cluster, but hoping not to get bitten by something unknown when I need to do it in production. I saw another thread recommending a migrate to either file or s3 storage, but I’m hoping to find a way to do backups without needing to seal the Vault up. Thanks for your help!

2

I think what the doc is suggesting is that if you’re using some non-HA storage system in conjunction with integrated storage as the HA solution (as in https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/raft-ha-storage), you can’t take snapshots of the HA state. Which is probably a non-issue for most people, as the data you normally care about is stored in whatever you’ve configured for storage in your vault.hcl.

3

Ahhh, thank you @ncabatoff! I was misunderstanding ‘ha’ vs ‘ha_storage’. Much appreciated!