---
title: "Aerospike Backup Service (ABS)"
description: "Overview of Aerospike Backup Service (ABS) for managing full and incremental database backups via a REST API."
---

# Aerospike Backup Service (ABS)

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

Aerospike Backup Service (ABS) is a standalone service that exposes a REST API for backup and restore operations. You can run full and incremental backups, and configure backup policies and schedules. ABS also exposes monitoring endpoints for health and backup status.

## Installation options

You can install ABS on Linux, on Kubernetes with or without Aerospike Kubernetes Operator (AKO), or with Docker Compose. See [Install](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/backup-service/install) to set up ABS and connect it to a sample database for testing. For AKO, see [Backup and Restore with AKO](https://aerospike.com/docs/kubernetes/tools/backup/overview).

## Configure ABS

ABS reads its configuration from a YAML file provided at startup. This file defines source database clusters, destination storage, backup policies, and backup routines. See [ABS configuration reference](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/backup-service/config-examples) and [ABS configuration file examples](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/backup-service/config) for details about these configuration files.

The ABS REST API can update the configuration and trigger backups on demand. Restore operations are performed with calls to the REST API. See [API Usage Examples](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/backup-service/api-examples) to learn how to use the REST API to perform common backup and restore tasks.

## Performance tuning

ABS uses a pipeline architecture with configurable reader and writer parallelism, compression, and storage parameters. See [Performance tuning](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/tools/backup-and-restore/backup-service/performance-tuning) for guidance on diagnosing bottlenecks with the pipeline metric and tuning throughput, compression, and memory usage.

## API specification

Use the OpenAPI generation script included in the GitHub repository to generate an OpenAPI specification for the service that you can host locally. A pre-built OpenAPI specification (Swagger format) is also available at [`aerospike.github.io/aerospike-backup-service/`](https://aerospike.github.io/aerospike-backup-service/).