Back up of HBase cluster is performed in following two ways:
Through Live cluster back up
Through full shut down back up
Live Cluster Back Up: In live backup strategy copy table utility is used to copy the data fromone table to another present in thesame cluster or other clusters. To dump the table content or table data the Export utility is used and the data is dumped onto HDFS of the same cluster.
Full Shut Down Back Up:In this approach a periodic shutdown of the HBase cluster is performed and in this shutdown the master and region servers go down in case when any in-flight change happens to storeFiles or metadata. This kind of approach can be used for back-end analytic capacity and at the same time it cannot be used for the applications that serve front-endwebpages.