Enable point-in-time recovery in DynamoDB - Amazon DynamoDB
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Enable point-in-time recovery in DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB point-in-time recovery (PITR) provides automatic backups of your DynamoDB table data. This section provides an overview of how the process works in DynamoDB.

Note

DynamoDB charges for PITR based on the size of each DynamoDB table, including table data and local secondary indexes. To determine your backup charges, DynamoDB continuously monitors the size of the tables that have PITR turned on. You're billed for PITR usage until you turn off PITR for each table.

Enabling point-in-time recovery

You can enable point-in-time recovery using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI), or the DynamoDB API. When enabled, point-in-time recovery provides continuous backups until you explicitly turn it off.

After you enable point-in-time recovery, you can restore to any point in time within EarliestRestorableDateTime and LatestRestorableDateTime. LatestRestorableDateTime is typically five minutes before the current time. For more information, see Restoring a DynamoDB table to a point in time.

Note

The point-in-time recovery process always restores to a new table.

Enable PITR (console)

To enable PITR using the DynamoDB console
  1. Navigate to the DynamoDB console.

  2. Choose Tables from the left navigation and select your DynamoDB table.

  3. From the Backups tab, for the Point in Time Recovery option, choose Edit.

  4. Choose Turn on point-in-time recovery and then choose Save changes.

Enable PITR (Amazon CLI)

Note

If you receive errors when running Amazon CLI commands, see Troubleshoot Amazon CLI errors. Make sure you're using the most recent Amazon CLI version.

Run the update-continuous-backups command with the point-in-time-recovery-specification setting turned on:

aws dynamodb update-continuous-backups \ --region us-east-1 \ --table-name <ddb-table-name> \ --point-in-time-recovery-specification PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled=true

Enable PITR (Amazon CloudFormation)

Use the AWS::DynamoDB::Table resource with the PointInTimeRecoverySpecification property turned on:

Resources: iotCatalog: Type: AWS::DynamoDB::Table Properties: ... PointInTimeRecoverySpecification: PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled: true

Request syntax example:

{ "PointInTimeRecoverySpecification": { "PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled": boolean }, "TableName": "string" }

Enable PITR (API)

Run the UpdateContinuousBackups API operation with the PointInTimeRecoverySpecification parameter turned on.

Request syntax example:

{ "PointInTimeRecoverySpecification": { "PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled": boolean }, "TableName": "string" }

Response syntax example:

{ "ContinuousBackupsDescription": { "ContinuousBackupsStatus": "string", "PointInTimeRecoveryDescription": { "EarliestRestorableDateTime": number, "LatestRestorableDateTime": number, "PointInTimeRecoveryStatus": "string" } } }

Python

import boto3 dynamodb = boto3.client('dynamodb') response = dynamodb.update_continuous_backups( TableName=<table_name>, PointInTimeRecoverySpecification={ 'PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled': True } )

Delete a table with PITR enabled

When you delete a table that has point-in-time recovery enabled, DynamoDB automatically creates a backup snapshot called a system backup and retains it for 35 days (at no additional cost). You can use the system backup to restore the deleted table to the state it was in before deletion. All system backups follow a standard naming convention of table-name$DeletedTableBackup.

Note

Once a table with point-in-time recovery enabled is deleted, you can use system restore to restore that table to a single point in time: the moment just before deletion. You do not have the capability to restore a deleted table to any other point in time in the past 35 days.