Prepare to backup Splunk UBA

Read and verify important information before backing up Splunk UBA.

Splunk UBA backups can be restored in the following scenarios:

Backup Method	Description and Use Case
Backup and restore Splunk UBA using automated incremental backups	Configure periodic full and incremental backups without stopping Splunk UBA. When configured, Splunk UBA will perform a full backup of your system, followed by periodic incremental backups. The incremental backups include any changes to system configurations, custom models, anomaly action rules, HR data and entities, and, threats and anomalies. Use incremental backup and restore when you want to backup and restore Splunk UBA to the same operating system and same number of nodes.
Migrate Splunk UBA using the backup and restore scripts	Run a script to stop Splunk UBA and perform a full backup. Use the backup and restore scripts to migrate your Splunk UBA deployment to a larger number of nodes on the same operating system. The restore script removes all file-based data sources and does not restore them on the target Splunk UBA system.

Backup disk size requirements

Add an additional disk to the Splunk UBA management node mounted as /backup for the Splunk UBA backups.

The size of the additional disk must follow these guidelines:

• The disk size must be at least half the size of your deployment in terabytes. For example, a 10-node system requires a 5TB disk.
• If you are creating archives, allow for an additional 50 percent of the backup disk size. For example, a 10-node system requires a 5TB disk for backups, and an additional 2.5TB if for archives, so you would need a 7.5TB disk for archived backups.

The table summarizes the minimum disk size requirements for Splunk UBA backups per deployment:

Number of Splunk UBA Nodes	Minimum Disk Size for Backup (without archives)	Minimum Disk Size for Backup (with archives)
1 Node	1TB	1.5TB
3 Nodes	1TB	1.5TB
5 Nodes	2TB	3TB
7 Nodes	4TB	6TB
10 Nodes	5TB	7.5TB
20 Nodes	10TB	15TB

If you have previous backups on the same disk, be sure to also take this into account when determining available disk space.

Scheduling Splunk UBA backups

Perform or schedule backups of Splunk UBA at 10:00 PM local time to avoid conflicts with the offline models, which begin running at Midnight each night.

How long will my backup take?

The amount of time it takes to perform a backup depends on a number of factors, such as:

• The size of your environment
• The age of your environment
• Network bandwidth
• Storage throughput
• Splunk UBA on cloud deployments may be subject to performance restrictions that will significantly increase the backup/restore time
• Creating a compressed archive will take considerably longer due to the time required to compress the data

As an example, a large multi-node deployment with 5TB of data may complete a backup in less than 2 hours if the network bandwidth and storage throughput are not limiting factors.