On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Noah Slater wrote: > > On 17 Aug 2011, at 11:06, Benoit Chesneau wrote: > >> Philosophy apart, dump and restore could be indeed useful to bootstrap >> db, make plain backup/restore strategies, exchange dbs over a disk/mem >> card without any couch installed etc. > > Yep, but in my mind this should live outside CouchDB's HTTP API. A dump and restore tool that lived on the command line, like the Subversion hotcopy stuff is the first thing that springs to mind. Or PostgreSQL's pgdump tool, or whatever. But as far as I understand the current file format, you should be able to just rsync the .couch files while the database is running. A small note, rsync copies the _security object and also _local docs. The latter are AFAIK only used by the replicator, and if you rsync to a different URL, those docs are pretty inert. It's not clear to me whether _security should travel with a database dump. It seems prudent to want to back that up. But if I restore to a different couch, it is imperative that I remember to correct the _security. The new couch (generally) has totally different user accounts and roles defined. Yet despite my initial disagreement with _dump, Adam has reminded or persuaded me (FWIW) that Couch really needs a better mechanism to clone or copy data efficiently. -- Iris Couch