Snapshots and recovery points

A backup in Amazon Redshift Serverless is a point-in-time representation of the objects and data in your namespace. There are two types of backups: snapshots that are manually created and recovery points that Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically creates for you. Recovery points are created every 30 minutes and are kept for 24 hours.

If you find that you want to retrieve the data in a snapshot or a recovery point, you can restore a snapshot to a serverless namespace or to a provisioned cluster. There are three scenarios in which you can restore snapshots:

When you restore a serverless snapshot to a provisioned cluster, you must choose the node type to use, such as RA3, and the number of nodes, letting you control settings at the cluster or node level.

To restore a provisioned cluster snapshot to a serverless namespace, start from the Redshift provisioned console, choose the snapshot to restore, then choose Restore from snapshot, Restore to serverless namespace. Amazon Redshift converts tables with interleaved keys into compound sort keys when you restore a provisioned cluster snapshot to a serverless namespace. For more information about sort keys, see Working with sort keys.

If you want to add additional context, you can tag snapshots and recovery points with key-value pairs that provide metadata and information to snapshots and recovery points. For more information about tagging resources, see Tagging resources overview.

Finally, you can also share snapshots with other AWS accounts, which lets them access data within the snapshot and run queries.