Skip to content

Aerospike Backup Control release notes

For the complete documentation index see: llms.txt

All documentation pages available in markdown.

absctl 1.2.0

October 4, 2026  |  Download

Summary

This release is built on backup-go v0.12.0. It adds scan compression to absctl backup, set index backup and restore, and a macOS installer for Apple silicon.

New features

  • Add --use-scan-compression to absctl backup, and the use-scan-compression YAML key, to compress data sent between Aerospike Server and absctl with zlib. Compression increases CPU and memory usage and decreases the size of data sent over the network. This option is valid for Aerospike Server Enterprise Edition only. See Compress data on the network. [BKRS-166]
  • Back up and restore set indexes on Aerospike Database 8.1.2 and later, which lists set indexes with secondary indexes in sindex-list. --no-indexes skips set indexes as well as secondary indexes. When a namespace has a set index, absctl writes the backup metadata in .asb format version 3.3, which absctl 1.1.1 and earlier cannot read. Restore these backups with absctl 1.2.0 or later. [BKRS-334]
  • Add a macOS installer package (.pkg) for Apple silicon. The package is signed and notarized, so it installs without a Gatekeeper prompt, and it installs absctl to /usr/local/bin. Intel Macs are not supported. See Install Aerospike Backup Control. [BKRS-427]

For the complete changelog, see the absctl 1.2.0 GitHub release page.

absctl 1.1.1

August 20, 2026  |  Download

Bug fixes

  • Skip secondary indexes with unknown index types instead of failing the backup. absctl logs a warning that identifies the skipped index and type. [BKRS-334]

For the complete changelog, see the absctl 1.1.1 GitHub release page.

absctl 1.1.0

July 16, 2026  |  Download

Summary

This release is built on backup-go v0.11.0. It adds file logging and tighter configuration validation. absctl also reports finer-grained progress during long-running backups and restores.

New features

  • Add --log-file to write logs to a file instead of stderr. Use it with --log-json to write JSON log lines. absctl appends to the file and does not rotate it, so configure external rotation and retention for long-running jobs. [BKRS-46]

Improvements

  • Disallow using --continue together with --remove-files, because removing files invalidates the saved backup state. [BKRS-71]
  • Validate --max-records and reject the flag unless --parallel is exactly 1. [BKRS-10]
  • Validate that --unique and --replace are mutually exclusive on restore. [BKRS-105]
  • Validate cloud backup --file-limit against chunk size so multipart uploads stay below 10,000 parts. [BKRS-187]
  • Validate encryption configuration more strictly: require --encrypt with a key source and allow only one key source. [BKRS-129]
  • Retrieve additional Aerospike Database connection and cloud-storage parameters from the Aerospike Secret Agent. [BKRS-89]
  • Retrieve --tls-* cluster connection flags from the Aerospike Secret Agent. [BKRS-129]
  • Rename structured log attributes to kebab-case, including parallel-read, file-limit, and state-file-dst. Update log parsers that relied on the previous names. [BKRS-74]
  • Show backup and restore progress with two decimal places, such as 99.31%, and report it more frequently during long jobs. [BKRS-218]
  • Increase default cloud upload chunk sizes to 50 MiB for Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS), and Azure Blob Storage. Change the default local file buffer to 4 MiB. [BKRS-187]
  • Improve scan throttling to limit backup load on the cluster. [BKRS-8]
  • Retry transient failures when creating secondary indexes and user-defined functions (UDFs) during restore. [BKRS-145]
  • Print backup estimates consistently and show the number of files before a restore starts. [BKRS-190]
  • Optimize Amazon S3 backup memory usage. [BKRS-155]
  • Optimize restore decoder performance. [BKRS-182]
  • Reduce allocations when encoding backup tokens.
  • Render duration values in logs as human-readable strings, such as 30s and 1m30s, instead of raw nanoseconds. [BKRS-171]
  • Write service messages to stderr so stdout stays clean for piped output.
  • Remove the misleading chunk-size log message during restore. [BKRS-231]

Bug fixes

  • Fix authentication to Google Cloud Storage when running with an attached Google Cloud service account and no key file. [BKRS-40]
  • Retry transient errors during large Google Cloud Storage uploads. [BKRS-244]
  • Fix a deadlock that could occur during secondary index creation on restore by updating the Aerospike Go client. [BKRS-26]
  • Improve encryption key error messages when PEM decoding fails. [BKRS-129]
  • Release limiter slots when a backup is canceled so later backups can start. [BKRS-114]
  • Change record-count mismatch messages from error to warning severity. [BKRS-156]
  • Remove internal client IDs from log messages. [BKRS-148]

For the complete changelog, see the absctl 1.1.0 GitHub release page.

absctl 1.0.0

February 2, 2026  |  Download

This initial release introduces absctl, the new Aerospike Backup Control command-line tool. Designed to replace legacy asbackup and asrestore, absctl consolidates backup and restore workflows into a single utility featuring native cloud support and improved operational efficiency.

Highlights

Unified CLI

  • Backup and restore consolidated into one tool: absctl backup and absctl restore
  • YAML configuration file support for scripted and scheduled operations
  • Structured JSON logging for log aggregation pipelines

Improved partition-based scanning

Backups use balanced partition-based scans with configurable parallelism (--parallel) for efficient hardware utilization, ensuring minimal and balanced load across all Aerospike cluster nodes:

  • Parallel partition scanning: Configurable parallelism (1-32 workers) with intelligent partition distribution
  • Partition filtering: Back up specific partition ranges or individual partitions
  • Minimal cluster impact: Rate limiting (RPS and bandwidth) to prevent backup operations from affecting production workloads
  • Resumable backups: State file support for continuing interrupted backups from the last checkpoint

Storage backend support

Flexible storage options for backup and restore:

  • Local disk: Direct backup to local filesystem with configurable buffer sizes
  • Amazon S3: Full support including storage classes (Standard, Glacier, Intelligent-Tiering, etc.), multipart uploads, and MinIO compatibility via endpoint override
  • Google Cloud Storage (GCS): Native GCP bucket integration
  • Azure Blob Storage: Complete Azure container support with both account key and Azure Active Directory authentication

Cloud backups do not require intermediate local storage.

AZ-aware backup

Backup node selection to optimize network topology and reduce costs:

  • --prefer-racks: Prefer reading from specific rack IDs while backing up the entire namespace (can fall back to other racks)
  • --rack-list: Back up partitions whose master is on a node in the listed racks when the job starts (potentially partial; restore all slices for a full data set)

--prefer-racks can reduce cross-availability-zone traffic during a full backup. --rack-list supports parallel backup sliced by rack. See Rack-aware backup: prefer-racks vs rack-list.

Additional features

  • TLS/mTLS for cluster connections
  • AES-128/256 encryption for backup files
  • ZSTD compression
  • Aerospike Secret Agent integration for credential management

Backward compatibility

  • Backup files (.asb) created by asbackup can be restored with absctl
  • Most CLI flags preserved from legacy tools

For migration details, see Legacy migration.