DynamoDB backup and restore using Data pipelines. How long does it take to backup and recover?

Question

I'm planning to use Data pipelines as a backup and recovery tool for our DynamoDB. We will be using amazon's prebuilt pipelines to backup to s3, and use the prebuilt recovery pipeline to recover to a new table in case of a disaster.

This will also serve a dual purpose of data archival for legal and compliance reasons. We have explored snapshots, but this can get quite expensive compared to s3. Does anyone have an estimate on how long it takes to backup a 1TB database? And How long it takes to recover a 1TB database?

I've read amazon docs and it says it can take up to 20 minutes to restore from a snapshot but no mention of how long for a data pipeline. Does anyone have any clues?

Answer 1

Does the newly released feature of exporting from DynamoDB to S3 do what you want for your use case? To use this feature, you must have continuous backups enabled though. Perhaps that will give you the short term backup you need?

Answer 2

It would be interesting to know why you're not planning to use the built-in backup mechanism. It offers point in time recovery and it is highly predictable in terms of cost and performance.

The Data Pipelines backup is unpredictable, will very likely cost more and operationally it is much less reliable. Plus getting a consistent snapshot (ie point in time) requires stopping the world. Speaking from experience, I don't recommend using Data Pipelines for backing up DynamoDB tables!

Regarding how long it takes to take a backup, that depends on a number of factors but mostly on the size of the table and the provisioned capacity you're willing to throw at it, as well as the size of the EMR cluster you're willing to work with. So, it could take anywhere from a minute to several hours.

Restoring time also depends on pretty much the same variables: provisioned capacity and total size. And it can also take anywhere from a minute to many hours.

Point in time backups offer consistent, predictable and most importantly reliable performance regardless of the size of the table: use that!

And if you're just interested in dumping the data from the table (i.e not necessarily the restore part) use the new export to S3.