Backup and restore for DynamoDB

DynamoDB offers on-demand backups and point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups to help protect your DynamoDB data from disaster events and offers data archiving for long-term retention. You can back up tables from a few megabytes to hundreds of terabytes of data, with no impact on performance and availability to your production applications. All backups are automatically encrypted, cataloged, and easily discoverable.

With on-demand backups, you can create a snapshot backup of your table that DynamoDB stores and manages. You're charged based on the size and duration of your backups. Using on-demand backup, you can restore your entire DynamoDB table to the exact state it was in when the backup was created.

There are two options for creating and managing DynamoDB on-demand backups:

You can use the DynamoDB on-demand backup capability to create full backups of your tables for long-term retention, and archiving for regulatory compliance needs. You can back up and restore your table data anytime from the AWS Management Console or with a single API call.

Point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups are fully managed by DynamoDB and provide up to 35 days of recovery points at a per second granularity. To use point-in-time recovery, which are continuous backups, enable point-in-time recovery (PITR) on your DynamoDB table. You get charged based on the size of your DynamoDB table for the duration you have PITR enabled on the table. Enabling Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) on your DynamoDB table continuously backs up your data. This helps you restore your table to a specific point in time within the PITR window by creating a new DynamoDB table with the exact state of your original table at that point in time.

Point-in-time recovery helps protect your DynamoDB tables from accidental write or delete operations. With point-in-time recovery, you don't have to worry about creating, maintaining, or scheduling on-demand backups. For example, suppose that a test script writes accidentally to a production DynamoDB table.

With point-in-time recovery, you can restore your table to any point in time during the last 35 days. After you enable point-in-time recovery, you can restore to any point in time from five minutes before the current time until 35 days ago. DynamoDB maintains incremental backups of your table.

In addition, point-in-time operations don't affect performance or API latencies.

You can restore a DynamoDB table to a point in time using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the DynamoDB API. The point-in-time recovery process restores to a new table.

For more information about AWS Region availability and pricing, see Amazon DynamoDB pricing.

The following video will give you an introductory look at the backup and restore concept and talk more about point-in-time recovery.