We are looking for the best way to backup/restore our HBase (Phoenix) databases in some of our development environments. These environments are running a standalone install of HBase, so no HDFS, writes go to the filesystem. I have looked through https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/6584/hbase-table-dump-to-flat-files.html and other documents, and most comments refer to HDFS commands, which obviously don't apply in this case. Can we just zip up the data directory? What about the metadata? We want to be able to "export" the database, and restore it to another environment (or over the existing one) at some point in the future. Having a portable artifact like a RDBMS backup would be ideal. ... View more

Probably a real simple question, but I can't seem to find the answer. What, if anything, is the impact on availability of a region during HBase maintenance tasks like major/minor compaction, region splits/merges, etc. For example can we read/write to a region while it is doing a compaction, or will that get blocked until the operation has completed? Thank you ... View more