Taking manual snapshots - Amazon OpenSearch Service
Snapshot storage and performanceTake a snapshot
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Taking manual snapshots

Snapshots are not instantaneous. They take time to complete and don't represent perfect point-in-time views of the cluster. While a snapshot is in progress, you can still index documents and make other requests to the cluster, but new documents and updates to existing documents generally aren't included in the snapshot. The snapshot includes primary shards as they existed when OpenSearch initiated the snapshot. Depending on the size of your snapshot thread pool, different shards might be included in the snapshot at slightly different times. For snapshot best practices, see Improve snapshot performance.

Snapshot storage and performance

OpenSearch snapshots are incremental, meaning they only store data that changed since the last successful snapshot. This incremental nature means the difference in disk usage between frequent and infrequent snapshots is often minimal. In other words, taking hourly snapshots for a week (for a total of 168 snapshots) might not use much more disk space than taking a single snapshot at the end of the week. Also, the more frequently you take snapshots, the less time they take to complete. For example, daily snapshots can take 20-30 minutes to complete, whereas hourly snapshots might complete within a few minutes. Some OpenSearch users take snapshots as often as every half hour.

Take a snapshot

You specify the following information when you create a snapshot:

  • The name of your snapshot repository

  • A name for the snapshot

The examples in this chapter use curl, a common HTTP client, for convenience and brevity. To pass a username and password to your curl request, see the Getting started tutorial.

If your access policies specify users or roles, you must sign your snapshot requests. For curl, you can use the --aws-sigv4 option with version 7.75.0 or later. You can also use the commented-out examples in the sample Python client to make signed HTTP requests to the same endpoints that the curl commands use.

To take a manual snapshot, perform the following steps:

  1. You can't take a snapshot if one is currently in progress. To check, run the following command:

    curl -XGET 'domain-endpoint/_snapshot/_status'

  2. Run the following command to take a manual snapshot:

    curl -XPUT 'domain-endpoint/_snapshot/repository-name/snapshot-name'

    To include or exclude certain indexes and specify other settings, add a request body. For the request structure, see Take snapshots in the OpenSearch documentation.

Note

The time required to take a snapshot increases with the size of the OpenSearch Service domain. Long-running snapshot operations sometimes encounter the following error: 504 GATEWAY_TIMEOUT. You can typically ignore these errors and wait for the operation to complete successfully. Run the following command to verify the state of all snapshots of your domain:

curl -XGET 'domain-endpoint/_snapshot/repository-name/_all?pretty'