We usually take care of things we value, whether it is an expensive smartphone or the company’s servers. Data is one of the most important assets of the organisation, and although we do not see it, it has to be carefully protected. We implement data at rest encryption to encrypt database files or whole volumes which contain our data. We implement data in transit encryption using SSL to make sure no one can sniff and collect data sent across networks. Backups are no different. No matter if this is a full backup or incremental, it will store at least a part of your data. As such, backups have to be encrypted too. In this blog post, we will look into some options you may have when it comes to encrypting backups. First though, let’s look at how you can encrypt your backups and what could be use cases for those methods.

State Snapshot Transfer (SST) is a way for Galera to transfer a full data copy from an existing node (donor) to a new node (joiner). If you come from a MySQL replication background, it is similar to taking a backup of a master and restoring on a slave. In Galera Cluster, the process is automated and is triggered depending on the joiner state.

SST can be painful in some occasions, as it can block the donor node (with SST methods like mysqldump or rsync) and burden it when backing up the data and feeding it to the joiner. For a dataset of a few hundred gigabytes or more, the syncing process can take hours to complete - even if you have a fast network. It might be advisable to avoid e.g. when running in WAN environments with slower connects and limited bandwidth, or if you just want a very fast way of introducing a new node in your cluster.