Backup and Restore Overview

This page provides an overview of the backup and restore features available in CockroachDB:

• Types of backup available in CockroachDB
• Backup and restore product support
• Schedules for periodic backups
• SQL statements for working with backups and restores
• Storage for backups

You can create full or incremental backups of a cluster, database, or table. Taking regular backups of your data is an operational best practice.

For an explanation of how a backup works, see Backup Architecture.

CockroachDB backup types

CockroachDB supports two types of backups:

• Managed-service backups: Cockroach Labs takes automated backups of CockroachDB Serverless and CockroachDB Dedicated clusters that are stored in Cockroach Labs' cloud storage. See Use Managed-Service Backups to learn more about the type and frequency of backups supported for both CockroachDB Cloud clusters.
• Customer-owned backups: You can take manual backups and store them in your cloud storage buckets using the BACKUP statement. Customer-owned backups are supported in CockroachDB Serverless, CockroachDB Dedicated, and CockroachDB Self-Hosted.

Backup and restore product support

This table outlines the level of product support for backup and restore features in CockroachDB. See each of the pages linked in the table for usage examples:

Backup / Restore	Description	Product Support
Full backup	An un-replicated copy of your cluster, database, or table's data. A full backup is the base for any further backups.	All products (Enterprise license not required)
Incremental backup	A copy of the changes in your data since the specified base backup (either a full backup or a full backup plus an incremental backup).	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — managed-service backups and customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Scheduled backup	A schedule for periodic backups.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Backups with revision history	A backup with revision history allows you to back up every change made within the garbage collection period leading up to and including the given timestamp.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Point-in-time restore	A restore from an arbitrary point in time within the revision history of a backup.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Encrypted backup and restore	An encrypted backup using a KMS or passphrase.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Locality-aware backup and restore	A backup where each node writes files to the backup destination that matches the node locality configured at node startup.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Locality-restricted backup execution	A backup with the EXECUTION LOCALITY option restricts the nodes that can execute a backup job with a defined locality filter.	CockroachDB Serverless — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Dedicated — customer-owned backups CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license

Additional backup and restore features

• Incremental backups with explicitly specified destinations
• Exclude a table's data from backups

Scheduled backups

CockroachDB supports creating schedules for periodic backups. Scheduled backups ensure that the data to be backed up is protected from garbage collection until it has been successfully backed up. This active management of protected timestamps means that you can run scheduled backups at a cadence independent from the GC TTL of the data.

For detail on scheduled backup features CockroachDB supports:

• Set up monitoring for the backup schedule
• View, pause, resume, or drop the schedule

Backup jobs with locality requirements

CockroachDB supports two backup features that use a node's locality to determine how a backup job runs or where the backup data is stored:

• Locality-restricted backup execution: Specify a set of locality filters for a backup job in order to restrict the nodes that can participate in the backup process to that locality. This ensures that the backup job is executed by nodes that meet certain requirements, such as being located in a specific region or having access to a certain storage bucket.
• Locality-aware backup: Partition and store backup data in a way that is optimized for locality. When you run a locality-aware backup, nodes write backup data to the cloud storage bucket that is closest to the node locality configured at node startup.

Backup and restore SQL statements

The following table outlines SQL statements you can use to create, configure, pause, and show backup and restore jobs:

SQL Statement	Description
BACKUP	Create full and incremental backups.
SHOW JOBS	Show a list of all running jobs or show the details of a specific job by its job ID.
PAUSE JOB	Pause a backup or restore job with its job ID.
RESUME JOB	Resume a backup or restore job with its job ID.
CANCEL JOB	Cancel a backup or restore job with its job ID.
SHOW BACKUP	Show a backup's details at the backup collection's storage location.
RESTORE	Restore full and incremental backups.
ALTER BACKUP	Add a new KMS encryption key to an encrypted backup.
CREATE SCHEDULE FOR BACKUP	Create a schedule for periodic backups.
ALTER BACKUP SCHEDULE	Alter an existing backup schedule.
SHOW SCHEDULES	View information on backup schedules.
PAUSE SCHEDULES	Pause backup schedules.
RESUME SCHEDULES	Resume paused backup schedules.
DROP SCHEDULES	Drop backup schedules.

Backup storage

We recommend taking backups to cloud storage and enabling object locking to protect the validity of your backups. CockroachDB supports Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Google Cloud Storage for backups. Read the following usage information:

• Example file URLs to form the URL that you pass to BACKUP and RESTORE statements.
• Authentication to set up authentication to a cloud storage bucket and include those credentials in the URL.

For detail on additional cloud storage features CockroachDB supports:

• Prevent backups from being overwritten or deleted with immutable storage buckets.
• Set a specific storage class for your backups with Storage Class (AWS S3 only).
• Expire past backups from cloud storage

Backup and restore observability

You can verify that your stored backups are restorable with backup validation. While a successful restore completely validates a backup, the validation tools offer a faster alternative and return an error message if a backup is not valid. There are three "levels" of verifying backups that give increasing validation coverage depending on the amount of runtime you want to invest in validating backups.

See the Backup Validation page for detail and examples.

You can track backup jobs using metrics that cover scheduled backups, status of running jobs, and details on completed or failed jobs. You can alert on these metrics via the Prometheus endpoint or the Datadog integration.

See the Backup and Restore Monitoring page for product availability and a list of the available metrics.

See also

• Considerations for using backup and restore
• Backup collections for details on how CockroachDB stores backups
• Restoring backups across major versions of CockroachDB