Back up Redpanda through the Kafka protocol

How Redpanda Kafka backup works​

Redpanda Kafka backup uses Redpanda's Kafka client endpoint. OSO Kafka Backup connects with bootstrap brokers and the security settings already used by your Kafka clients.

Redpanda documents compatibility with modern Kafka clients and publishes exceptions for unsupported protocol features. Validate your Redpanda release against the operations your backup plan requires.

The backup writes topic records, consumer group offsets, and topic configuration to storage you control. That copy remains separate from the live cluster and can restore to a millisecond timestamp. The configuration reference documents every key below.

Connect OSO Kafka Backup to Redpanda​

This example uses SASL_SSL with SCRAM-SHA256. Redpanda also supports other Kafka API security options. Match the configuration to your listeners and keep credentials in environment variables.

mode: backup
backup_id: redpanda-prod-daily

source:
bootstrap_servers:
  - redpanda.example.com:9092
security:
  security_protocol: SASL_SSL
  sasl_mechanism: SCRAM-SHA256
  sasl_username: backup-service
  sasl_password: ${REDPANDA_PASSWORD}
topics:
  include:
    - "*"

storage:
backend: s3
bucket: my-kafka-backups
region: us-east-1
prefix: redpanda/production

backup:
compression: zstd
include_offset_headers: true
consumer_group_snapshot: true

mode: restore
backup_id: redpanda-prod-daily

target:
bootstrap_servers:
  - redpanda.example.com:9092
security:
  security_protocol: SASL_SSL
  sasl_mechanism: SCRAM-SHA256
  sasl_username: restore-service
  sasl_password: ${REDPANDA_RESTORE_PASSWORD}

storage:
backend: s3
bucket: my-kafka-backups
region: us-east-1
prefix: redpanda/production

restore:
consumer_group_strategy: header-based
auto_consumer_groups: true

kafka-backup backup --config redpanda-backup.yaml

What the Redpanda backup protects​

Redpanda protects the availability and durability of its live cluster. An independent backup adds recovery from logical events such as unwanted writes, topic deletion, or operator mistakes.

Restores can return data to the original Redpanda cluster or write to another reachable Kafka target. Topic and partition mapping also supports migration and isolated recovery testing. Review the disaster recovery use cases when setting recovery objectives.