Backup and Restore Overview

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.

Backup and restore types

The following table outlines the available backup and restore types in CockroachDB. See each of the pages linked in the table for usage examples:

Backup / Restore Type Description Product
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
Incremental backup A copy of the changes in your data since the specified base backup (a full or full and incremental). CockroachDB Dedicated
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 Dedicated
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 Dedicated
CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Encrypted backup and restore An encrypted backup using a KMS or passphrase. CockroachDB Dedicated
CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Locality-aware backup and restore A backup where each node writes files only to the backup destination that matches the node locality configured at node startup. CockroachDB Dedicated
CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Scheduled backup A schedule for periodic backups. CockroachDB Dedicated
CockroachDB Self-Hosted with an Enterprise license
Automated backup Cockroach Labs runs full backups daily and incremental backups hourly for every CockroachDB Cloud cluster. CockroachDB Cloud clusters

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.

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:

See also


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