SingleStore plans to ship a release in the first half of 2022 that will not support restoring of backups from SingleStore 6.8 or earlier. The reason for this is that in the 7.0 release, SingleStore made major changes to the database, log, and backup formats, such that the 6.8 and earlier backup formats are obsolete from a technical standpoint.
This change to the data, log, and backup formats is a very infrequent event in the life cycle of SingleStore. There are no plans to do this again in the foreseeable future.
To prepare for the inability to restore older backups into newer versions, SingleStore recommends that customers running 6.8 or earlier versions upgrade to 7.0 or later by the end of 2021, take new backups, and change procedures, if possible, so that the backups taken prior to upgrading are no longer needed. SingleStore 6.8 has already reached its end-of-life date, so it is also important for that reason to upgrade as soon as possible if you are running 6.8 or earlier.
For those customers that need to keep around older backups for an extended period of time, it is recommended that they do one of the following:
- Maintain a 7.5 or earlier installation in a test or pre-production environment so they can restore 6.8 and earlier backup versions if they are ever needed.
- Upgrade their backups by restoring them into a 7.0 to 7.5 test or pre-production environment, then backing up the data again. After the new backups are validated (by restoring them), the old ones can be discarded.