Backup tracing

[dmai (Daniel Mai)]

We have an open RFC about adding a way to run backup requests in the background and checking their status:

[RFC] GraphQL API for long-running tasks

Motivation Dgraph’s current backup/export API makes the user wait until the whole operation is complete. While this synchronous behaviour is great for smaller databases, it times out if it takes longer than 10 minutes; after this, the only way of knowing its status is checking logs. As @dmai pointed out, this starts occurring when the p directory is ~50 GB (see here). It’s generally not considered good API design to make the user wait for long-running operations. Not only is it an inconvenience…