Migrate your TimescaleDB database to Timescale Cloud

You can migrate your data to Timescale Cloud from self-hosted TimescaleDB or Managed Service for TimescaleDB. This allows you to use Timescale Cloud’s exclusive features, including separate scaling for compute and storage requirements, first-class multi-node support, and more.

There are two methods for migrating your data:

• Migrate your entire database at once: This method directly transfers all data and schemas, including TimescaleDB-specific features. Your hypertables, continuous aggregates, and policies are automatically available in Cloud.
• Migrate your schema and data separately: With this method, you migrate your tables one by one for easier failure recovery. If migration fails mid-way, you can restart from the failure point rather than from the beginning. However, TimescaleDB-specific features won’t be automatically migrated. Follow the instructions to restore your hypertables, continuous aggregates, and policies.

Choose a migration method

Which method you choose depends on your database size, network upload and download speeds, existing continuous aggregates, and tolerance for failure recovery.

If your database is smaller than 100 GB, choose to migrate your entire database at once. You can also migrate larger databases using this method, but the copying process must keep running, potentially over days or weeks. If the copy is interrupted, the process needs to be restarted. If you think an interruption in the copy is possible, choose to migrate your schema and data separately instead.

warning

Migrating your schema and data separately does not retain continuous aggregates calculated using already-deleted data. For example, if you delete raw data after a month but retain downsampled data in a continuous aggregate for a year, the continuous aggregate loses any data older than a month upon migration. If you must keep continuous aggregates calculated using deleted data, migrate your entire database at once regardless of database size.

If you aren’t sure which method to use, try copying the entire database at once to estimate the time required. If the time estimate is very long, stop the migration and switch to the other method.

Migrate an active database

If your database is actively ingesting data, take precautions to ensure that Timescale Cloud contains the data that is ingested while the migration is happening. Begin by running ingest in parallel on the source database and Timescale Cloud. This ensures that the newest data is written to both databases. Then backfill your data with one of the two migration methods.