Backup and Recovery

YDB is designed to preserve data against hardware failures: redundancy options are available for various numbers of availability zones, racks, hosts, disks, and other components (see cluster operating modes). This reduces the risk of data loss due to hardware failures.

However, data can be lost or corrupted logically: errors or malicious actions can cause mass deletion or distortion of data through operations that are legitimate from the DBMS perspective. In such cases, cluster fault tolerance does not replace a separate copy of data outside the cluster.

Backup is used to protect against such scenarios and allows you to restore data from a backup copy. It is recommended to keep copies on separate storage media or in cloud object storage (for example, via dumping to files or export to S3).

YDB provides several solutions for performing backup and recovery. For conceptual information and comparison of backup methods, see Backup concepts.

  • Backup to files and recovery using YDB CLI.
  • Backup to S3-compatible storage and recovery using YDB CLI.

YDB CLI

Files

The following commands are used to back up files:

  • ydb admin cluster dump — for backing up cluster metadata
  • ydb admin database dump — for backing up a database
  • ydb tools dump — for backing up individual schema objects or directories

You can learn more about these commands in Exporting data to the file system.

The following commands are used to perform recovery from a file backup:

  • ydb admin cluster restore — for restoring cluster metadata from a backup
  • ydb admin database restore — for restoring a database from a backup
  • ydb tools restore — for restoring individual schema objects or directories from a backup

You can learn more about these commands in Importing data from the file system.

S3-Compatible Storage

The ydb export s3 command is used to back up data to S3-compatible storage (for example, AWS S3). Follow this link to the YDB CLI reference for information about this command.

The ydb import s3 command is used to recover data from a backup created in S3-compatible storage. Follow this link to the YDB CLI reference for information about this command.

Note

The speed of backup and recovery operations to/from S3-compatible storage is configured to minimize impact on user workload. To control the speed of operations, configure limits for the corresponding queue in the resource broker.

Note

When running the export operation, a directory named export_* is created in the root directory, where * is the numeric part of the export ID. This directory stores tables with a consistent snapshot of exported data as of the export start time. After a successful backup, the export_* directory and its contents are removed.

Backup Collections

Backup collections enable incremental backups and recovery to any saved backup point in the chain for production workloads. For conceptual information and architecture details, see Backup collections.

Backup collections are recommended for production environments with regular backup schedules and large datasets where incremental changes are much smaller than total data size. For simpler scenarios (one-time migrations, development environments, small databases), consider using export/import or dump/restore instead.

For step-by-step instructions on configuring and using backup collections, see:

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