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

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CockroachDB backup types

CockroachDB supports two types of backups:
  • Managed backups: Cockroach Labs takes automated backups of CockroachDB Cloud clusters that are stored in Cockroach Labs’ cloud storage. Refer to Managed Backups to learn more about the type and frequency of backups supported for both CockroachDB Cloud clusters.
  • Self-managed backups: Self-managed backups: You can take manual backups and store them in your cloud storage buckets using the BACKUP statement. Self-managed backups are supported in all CockroachDB plans and CockroachDB self-hosted.

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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:

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Additional backup and restore features

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Scheduled backups

We recommend using scheduled backups to automate daily backups of your cluster.
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:

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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.

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Backup and restore SQL statements

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

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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:
Cockroach Labs recommends enabling Egress Perimeter Controls on CockroachDB Advanced clusters to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration when accessing external resources, such as cloud storage for change data capture or backup and restore operations. See Egress Perimeter Controls for detail and setup instructions.

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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.

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See also