CouchDB backups and cloning the database

Another thing to be aware of is that you can copy files out from under a live database. Given that you may have a possibly large database, you could just copy it OOB from your test/production machine to another machine.

Depending on the write load of the machines it may be advisable to trigger a replication after the copy to gather any writes that were in progress when the file was copied. But replication of a few records would still be quicker than replication the entire database.

For reference see: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/FilesystemBackups

CouchDB supports replication, so just replicate to another instance of CouchDB and backup from there, avoiding disturbing where you write changes to.

https://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/maintenance/backups.html

You literally send a POST request to your CouchDB instance telling it where to replicate to, and it Works(tm)

EDIT: You can just cp out the .couch files in the data directory from under the running database as long as you can accept the I/O hit.

I'd like to second Paul's suggestion: Just cp your database files from under the live server if you can take the I/O-load hit. If you run a replicated copy anyway, you can safely copy from that too, without impacting your master's performance.