Restoring from a DB cluster snapshot

Amazon RDS creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB cluster, backing up the entire DB instance and not just individual databases. You can create a DB cluster by restoring from this DB cluster snapshot. When you restore the DB cluster, you provide the name of the DB cluster snapshot to restore from, and then provide a name for the new DB cluster that is created from the restore. You can't restore from a DB cluster snapshot to an existing DB cluster; a new DB cluster is created when you restore.

You can use the restored DB cluster as soon as its status is available. The DB cluster continues to load data in the background. This is known as lazy loading.

If you access data that hasn't been loaded yet, the DB cluster immediately downloads the requested data from Amazon S3, and then continues loading the rest of the data in the background. For more information, see Amazon EBS snapshots.

To help mitigate the effects of lazy loading on tables to which you require quick access, you can perform operations that involve full-table scans, such as SELECT *. This allows Amazon RDS to download all of the backed-up table data from S3.

Note

Sharing a manual DB cluster snapshot, whether encrypted or unencrypted, enables authorized AWS accounts to directly restore a DB cluster from the snapshot instead of taking a copy of it and restoring from that. For more information, see Sharing a DB cluster snapshot.

Parameter group considerations

We recommend that you retain the parameter group for any DB cluster snapshots you create, so that you can associate your restored DB cluster with the correct parameter group. You can specify the parameter group when you restore the DB cluster.

Security group considerations

When you restore a DB cluster, the default security group is associated with the restored cluster by default.

Note

• If you're using the Amazon RDS console, you can specify a custom security group to associate with the cluster or create a new VPC security group.

• If you're using the AWS CLI, you can specify a custom security group to associate with the cluster by including the --vpc-security-group-ids option in the restore-db-cluster-from-snapshot command.

• If you're using the Amazon RDS API, you can include the VpcSecurityGroupIds.VpcSecurityGroupId.N parameter in the RestoreDBClusterFromSnapshot action.

As soon as the restore is complete and your new DB cluster is available, you can associate any custom security groups used by the snapshot you restored from. You must apply these changes by modifying the DB cluster with the RDS console, the AWS CLI modify-db-cluster command, or the ModifyDBCluster Amazon RDS API operation. For more information, see Modifying an Amazon Aurora DB cluster.

Amazon Aurora considerations

With Aurora, you restore a DB cluster snapshot to a DB cluster.

With Aurora MySQL, you can also restore a DB cluster snapshot to an Aurora Serverless DB cluster. For more information, see Restoring an Aurora Serverless v1 DB cluster.

With Aurora MySQL, you can restore a DB cluster snapshot from a cluster without parallel query to a cluster with parallel query. Because parallel query is typically used with very large tables, the snapshot mechanism is the fastest way to ingest large volumes of data to an Aurora MySQL parallel query-enabled cluster. For more information, see Working with parallel query for Amazon Aurora MySQL.

Restoring from a snapshot

You can restore a DB cluster from a DB cluster snapshot using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the RDS API.

Console

To restore a DB cluster from a DB cluster snapshot

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Snapshots.

3. Choose the DB cluster snapshot that you want to restore from.

4. For Actions, choose Restore snapshot.

5. On the Restore snapshot page, for DB instance identifier, enter the name for your restored DB cluster.

6. Choose Restore DB instance.

AWS CLI

To restore a DB cluster from a DB cluster snapshot, use the AWS CLI command restore-db-cluster-from-snapshot.

In this example, you restore from a previously created DB cluster snapshot named mydbclustersnapshot. You restore to a new DB cluster named mynewdbcluster.

Example

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds restore-db-cluster-from-snapshot \
    --db-cluster-identifier mynewdbcluster \
    --snapshot-identifier mydbclustersnapshot \
    --engine aurora|aurora-mysql|aurora-postgresql

For Windows:

aws rds restore-db-cluster-from-snapshot ^
    --db-cluster-identifier mynewdbcluster ^
    --snapshot-identifier mydbclustersnapshot ^
    --engine aurora|aurora-mysql|aurora-postgresql

After the DB cluster has been restored, you must add the DB cluster to the security group used by the DB cluster used to create the DB cluster snapshot if you want the same functionality as that of the previous DB cluster.

Important

If you use the console to restore a DB cluster, then Amazon RDS automatically creates the primary instance (writer) for your DB cluster. If you use the AWS CLI to restore a DB cluster, you must explicitly create the primary instance for your DB cluster. The primary instance is the first instance that is created in a DB cluster. Call the create-db-instance AWS CLI command to create the primary instance for your DB cluster. Include the name of the DB cluster as the --db-cluster-identifier option value.

RDS API

To restore a DB cluster from a DB cluster snapshot, call the RDS API operation RestoreDBClusterFromSnapshot with the following parameters:

• DBClusterIdentifier

• SnapshotIdentifier

Important

If you use the console to restore a DB cluster, then Amazon RDS automatically creates the primary instance (writer) for your DB cluster. If you use the RDS API to restore a DB cluster, you must explicitly create the primary instance for your DB cluster. The primary instance is the first instance that is created in a DB cluster. Call the RDS API operation CreateDBInstance to create the primary instance for your DB cluster. Include the name of the DB cluster as the DBClusterIdentifier parameter value.