---
title: "Legacy Aerospike backup tool (asbackup)"
description: "Overview of the legacy asbackup CLI tool for creating Aerospike Database backups to local storage or Amazon S3."
---

# Legacy Aerospike backup tool (asbackup)

> For the complete documentation index see: [llms.txt](https://aerospike.com/docs/llms.txt)
> 
> All documentation pages available in markdown.

`asbackup` is the legacy CLI tool for creating backups from an Aerospike Database cluster.

::: note
`asbackup` is deprecated as of the launch of [Backup (`absctl backup`)](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/absctl/backup).
:::

## Overview

`asbackup` backs up data from Aerospike Database according to a user-defined scope of specific namespaces, sets, or both. The scope supports further refinement with partition or time-based filters.

`asbackup` scans the database and fetches matching records, capturing essential data needed for recovery and ignoring non-critical system or secondary data.

As `asbackup` identifies records for backup, it serializes the data into a predefined format and writes it to a backup file or directory. Serialization converts the in-memory representation of records into a stable format that can be safely stored on disk.

`asbackup` supports backing up locally (see [Get started](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/use#get-started)) or [to an Amazon S3 bucket](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/s3/).

## `asbackup` limitations

`asbackup` has the following limitations:

-   `asbackup` requires `read` privileges or higher. See [Configuring access control](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/manage/security/rbac/#privileges) for more information.
    
-   Direct backups are supported only to S3, but you can use other services for storing the backup files after creating them locally.
    
-   You can control the size of backup files created by `asbackup` with the `--file-limit` option. When a backup file reaches the configured size, `asbackup` creates another file. `asbackup` does not have an upper limit for the size of an individual backup file.
    
-   When running in directory mode, each worker thread creates its own backup file. If the backup file is less than the size specified in `--file-limit`, the backup file is placed on a queue to be reused by another backup job.
    
-   Zstandard (`zstd`) is the only compression algorithm that `asbackup` supports.
    

## Default backup content

`asbackup` backs up the following data by default:

-   Keys
    -   Key metadata: digest, TTL, generation count, and key
    -   Regular bins: String, Integer, Boolean, and Bytes
    -   Collection data type (CDT) bins: List and Map
    -   GeoJSON data type bins
    -   HyperLogLog data type bins
-   Secondary index definitions
-   User-defined function (UDF) modules

## Related topics

-   [Run Aerospike backup](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/use)
-   [Estimate resources for Aerospike backup](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/resources)
-   [Back up data to Amazon S3](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/s3)
-   [Secret usage with backup and restore](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/asbackup/secrets)
-   [Backup file format](https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-tools-backup/tree/master#backup-file-format)