Cluster Snapshot Considerations

Amazon DocumentDB creates daily automatic snapshots of your cluster during your cluster’s backup window. Amazon DocumentDB saves the automatic snapshots of your cluster according to the backup retention period that you specify. If necessary, you can recover your cluster to any point in time during the backup retention period. Automatic snapshots don’t occur while a copy operation is executing in the same Region for the same cluster.

In addition to automatic cluster snapshots, you can also manually create a cluster snapshot. You can copy both automatic and manual snapshots. For more information, see Creating a Manual Cluster Snapshot and Copying Amazon DocumentDB Cluster Snapshots.

Note

Your cluster must be in the available state for an automatic snapshot to be taken.

You can’t share an Amazon DocumentDB automated cluster snapshot. As a workaround, you can create a manual snapshot by copying the automated snapshot, and then share that copy. For more information about copying a snapshot, see Copying Amazon DocumentDB Cluster Snapshots. For more information about restoring a cluster from a snapshot, see Restoring from a Cluster Snapshot.

Backup Storage

Your Amazon DocumentDB backup storage for each AWS Region is composed of the backup storage needed for your backup retention period, which includes automatic and manual cluster snapshots in that Region. The default backup retention period is 1 day. For more information about backup storage pricing, see Amazon DocumentDB Pricing.

When you delete a cluster, all of its automatic snapshots are deleted and cannot be recovered. However, manual snapshots are not deleted when you delete a cluster. if you choose to have Amazon DocumentDB create a final snapshot (manual snapshot) before your cluster is deleted, you can use the final snapshot to recover your cluster.

For more information on snapshots and storage, see Understanding Backup Storage Usage.

Backup Window

Automatic snapshots occur daily during the preferred backup window. If the snapshot requires more time than allotted to the backup window, the backup process continues until it finishes, even though the backup window has ended. The backup window can’t overlap with the weekly maintenance window for the cluster.

If you don’t specify a preferred backup window when you create the cluster, Amazon DocumentDB assigns a default 30-minute backup window. This window is chosen at random from an 8-hour block of time associated with your cluster’s Region. You can change your preferred backup window by modifying the cluster. For more information, see Modifying an Amazon DocumentDB Cluster.

The following table lists the time blocks for each Region from which default maintenance windows are assigned.

Backup Retention Period

The backup retention period is the number of days an automatic backup is retained before being automatically deleted. Amazon DocumentDB supports a backup retention period of 1–35 days.

You can set the backup retention period when you create a cluster. If you don’t explicitly set the backup retention period, the default backup retention period of 1 day is assigned to your cluster. After you create a cluster, you can modify the backup retention period by modifying the cluster using either the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI. For more information, see Modifying an Amazon DocumentDB Cluster.