Copying shards for backup in CouchDB 2

Question

I want to backup my CouchDB to S3.

In CouchDB 1.x, I simply tar the .couch files and upload the resulting file.

In CouchDB 2.x, sharding occurs.

Can I still safely backup CouchDB 2 by zipping up the data directory the same way?

Answer 1

After discussing with people on the CouchDB IRC channel, it seems like it is safe to backup and restore a single node CouchDB 2 server by backing up /shards as long as _dbs.couch is also backed up (which contains the shard information).

For the full conversation, see this post: http://pastebin.com/MkudTeCY