VMware Tanzu Greenplum Database supports parallel and non-parallel methods for backing up and restoring databases. Parallel operations scale regardless of the number of segments in your system, because segment hosts each write their data to local disk storage simultaneously. With non-parallel backup and restore operations, the data must be sent over the network from the segments to the master, which writes all of the data to its storage. In addition to restricting I/O to one host, non-parallel backup requires that the master have sufficient local disk storage to store the entire database.