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).

Enabling point-in-time recovery

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.

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.

Enable PITR (console)

Enable PITR (Amazon CLI)

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

Enable PITR (API)

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.