These are the currently known issues and limitations of gpbackup and gprestore. Where applicable, workarounds are included to help mitigate the impact of these issues.

• If you create an index on a parent partitioned table, gpbackup doesn't back up that same index on child partitioned tables of the parent, as creating the same index on a child would cause an error. However, if you exchange a partition, gpbackup doesn't detect that the index on the exchanged partition is inherited from the new parent table. In this case, gpbackup backs up conflicting CREATE INDEX statements, which causes an error when you restore the backup set.

• You can execute multiple instances of gpbackup, but each execution requires a distinct timestamp.

• Database object filtering is currently limited to schemas and tables.

• When backing up a partitioned table where some or all leaf partitions are in different schemas from the root partition, the leaf partition table definitions, including the schemas, are backed up as metadata. This occurs even if the backup operation specifies that schemas containing the leaf partitions should be excluded. To control data being backed up for this type of partitioned table, use the --leaf-partition-data option.

• If you use the gpbackup --single-data-file option to combine table backups into a single file per segment, you can't perform a parallel restore operation with gprestore (you can't set --jobs to a value higher than 1).

• You can't use --exclude-table-file with --leaf-partition-data. Although you can specify leaf partition names in a file specified with --exclude-table-file, gpbackup ignores the partition names.

• Backing up a database with gpbackup while simultaneously running DDL commands might cause gpbackup to fail, in order to ensure consistency within the backup set. For example, if a table is dropped after the start of the backup operation, gpbackup exits and displays the error relation <schema.table> does not exist.

• gpbackup might fail when a table is dropped during a backup operation due to table locking issues. gpbackup generates a list of tables to back up and acquires an ACCESS SHARE lock on the tables. If an EXCLUSIVE LOCK is held on a table, gpbackup acquires the ACCESS SHARE lock after the existing lock is released. If the table no longer exists when gpbackup attempts to acquire a lock on the table, gpbackup exits with an error. For tables that might be dropped during a backup, exclude the tables from a backup with a gpbackup table filtering option such as --exclude-table or --exclude-schema.

• A backup created with gpbackup can only be restored to a WarehousePG cluster with the same number of segment instances as the source cluster. If you run gpexpand to add segments to the cluster, backups made before starting the expansion can't be restored after the expansion completes.