RESTORE is an enterprise-only feature. For non-enterprise restores, see Perform core backup and restore.
The RESTORE statement restores your cluster's schemas and data from an enterprise BACKUP stored on a services such as AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, NFS, or HTTP storage.
Because CockroachDB is designed with high fault tolerance, restores are designed primarily for disaster recovery, i.e., restarting your cluster if it loses a majority of its nodes. Isolated issues (such as small-scale node outages) do not require any intervention.
You can restore:
- New in v20.1: A full cluster
- Databases
- Tables
Required privileges
Only members of the admin role can run RESTORE. By default, the root user belongs to the admin role.
Synopsis
Parameters
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
table_pattern |
The table or view you want to restore. |
database_name |
The name of the database you want to restore (i.e., restore all tables and views in the database). You can restore an entire database only if you had backed up the entire database. |
full_backup_location |
The URL where the full backup is stored. For information about this URL structure, see Backup File URLs. |
incremental_backup_location |
The URL where an incremental backup is stored. Lists of incremental backups must be sorted from oldest to newest. The newest incremental backup's timestamp must be within the table's garbage collection period. For information about this URL structure, see Backup File URLs. For more information about garbage collection, see Configure Replication Zones. |
AS OF SYSTEM TIME timestamp |
Restore data as it existed as of timestamp. You can restore point-in-time data only if you had taken full or incremental backup with revision history. |
kv_option_list |
Control your backup's behavior with these options. |
The RESTORE statement is a blocking statement and cannot be used within a transaction.
Options
You can include the following options as key-value pairs in the kv_option_list to control the restore process's behavior:
| Option | Value |
Description |
|---|---|---|
into_db |
Database name | Use to change the target database for table restores. (Does not apply to database or cluster restores.) Example: WITH into_db = 'newdb' |
skip_missing_foreign_keys |
N/A | Use to remove the foreign key constraints before restoring. Example: WITH skip_missing_foreign_keys |
skip_missing_sequences |
N/A | Use to ignore sequence dependencies (i.e., the DEFAULT expression that uses the sequence).Example: WITH skip_missing_sequences |
skip_missing_views |
N/A | Use to skip restoring views that cannot be restored because their dependencies are not being restored at the same time. Example: WITH skip_missing_views |
encryption_passphrase |
Passphrase used to create the encrypted backup | New in v20.1: The passphrase used to decrypt the file(s) that were encrypted by the BACKUP statement. |
Backup file URLs
The URL for your backup's locations must use the following format:
[scheme]://[host]/[path]?[parameters]
| Location | Scheme | Host | Parameters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | s3 |
Bucket name | AUTH 1 (optional; can be implicit or specified), AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SESSION_TOKEN |
| Azure | azure |
N/A (see Example file URLs | AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY, AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME |
| Google Cloud 2 | gs |
Bucket name | AUTH (optional; can be default, implicit, or specified), CREDENTIALS |
| HTTP 3 | http |
Remote host | N/A |
| NFS/Local 4 | nodelocal |
nodeID or self 5 (see Example file URLs) |
N/A |
| S3-compatible services 6 | s3 |
Bucket name | AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SESSION_TOKEN, AWS_REGION 7 (optional), AWS_ENDPOINT |
The location parameters often contain special characters that need to be URI-encoded. Use Javascript's encodeURIComponent function or Go language's url.QueryEscape function to URI-encode the parameters. Other languages provide similar functions to URI-encode special characters.
If your environment requires an HTTP or HTTPS proxy server for outgoing connections, you can set the standard HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables when starting CockroachDB.
New in v20.1: If you cannot run a full proxy, you can disable external HTTP(S) access (as well as custom HTTP(S) endpoints) when performing bulk operations (e.g., BACKUP, RESTORE, etc.) by using the --external-io-disable-http flag. You can also disable the use of implicit credentials when accessing external cloud storage services for various bulk operations by using the --external-io-disable-implicit-credentials flag.
1 If the
AUTHparameter is not provided, AWS connections default tospecifiedand the access keys must be provided in the URI parameters. If theAUTHparameter isimplicit, the access keys can be omitted and the credentials will be loaded from the environment.2 If the
AUTHparameter is not specified, thecloudstorage.gs.default.keycluster setting will be used if it is non-empty, otherwise theimplicitbehavior is used. If theAUTHparameter isimplicit, all GCS connections use Google's default authentication strategy. If theAUTHparameter isdefault, thecloudstorage.gs.default.keycluster setting must be set to the contents of a service account file which will be used during authentication. If theAUTHparameter isspecified, GCS connections are authenticated on a per-statement basis, which allows the JSON key object to be sent in theCREDENTIALSparameter. The JSON key object should be base64-encoded (using the standard encoding in RFC 4648).3 You can create your own HTTP server with Caddy or nginx. A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the
cloudstorage.http.custom_cacluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from HTTPS URLs.4 The file system backup location on the NFS drive is relative to the path specified by the
--external-io-dirflag set while starting the node. If the flag is set todisabled, then imports from local directories and NFS drives are disabled.5 New in v20.1: Using a
nodeIDis required and the data files will be in theexterndirectory of the specified node. In most cases (including single-node clusters), usingnodelocal://1/<path>is sufficient. Useselfif you do not want to specify anodeID, and the individual data files will be in theexterndirectories of arbitrary nodes; however, to work correctly, each node must have the--external-io-dirflag point to the same NFS mount or other network-backed, shared storage.6 A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the
cloudstorage.http.custom_cacluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from an S3-compatible service.7 The
AWS_REGIONparameter is optional since it is not a required parameter for most S3-compatible services. Specify the parameter only if your S3-compatible service requires it.
Example file URLs
| Location | Example |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | s3://acme-co/employees?AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=123&AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=456 |
| Azure | azure://employees?AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY=123&AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME=acme-co |
| Google Cloud | gs://acme-co |
| HTTP | http://localhost:8080/employees |
| NFS/Local | nodelocal://1/path/employees, nodelocal://self/nfsmount/backups/employees 5 |
Functional details
You can restore:
- New in v20.1: A full cluster
- Databases
- Tables
Full cluster
New in v20.1: A full cluster restore can only be run on a target cluster with no user-created databases or tables. Restoring a full cluster includes:
- All user tables
- Relevant system tables
- All databases
- All tables (which automatically includes their indexes)
- All views
When you do a full cluster restore, it will restore the enterprise license of the cluster you are restoring from. If you want to use a different license in the new cluster, make sure to update the license after the restore is complete.
Databases
Restoring a database will create a new database and restore all of its tables and views.
The created database will have the name of the database in the backup. The database cannot already exist in the target cluster.
If dropping or renaming an existing database is not an option, you can use table restore to restore all tables into the existing database:
RESTORE backup_database_name.* FROM 'your_backup_location'
WITH into_db = 'your_target_db'
The into_db option only applies to table restores.
Tables
You can also restore individual tables (which automatically includes their indexes) or views from a backup. This process uses the data stored in the backup to create entirely new tables or views in the target database.
By default, tables and views are restored into a target database matching the name of the database from which they were backed up. If the target database does not exist, you must create it. You can choose to change the target database with the into_db option.
The target database must not have tables or views with the same name as the tables or views you're restoring. If any of the restore target's names are being used, you can:
DROP TABLE,DROP VIEW, orDROP SEQUENCEand then restore them. Note that a sequence cannot be dropped while it is being used in a column'sDEFAULTexpression, so those expressions must be dropped before the sequence is dropped, and recreated after the sequence is recreated. Thesetvalfunction can be used to set the value of the sequence to what it was previously.- Restore the table or view into a different database.
RESTORE only offers table-level granularity; it does not support restoring subsets of a table.
Object dependencies
Dependent objects must be restored at the same time as the objects they depend on.
| Object | Depends On |
|---|---|
| Table with foreign key constraints | The table it REFERENCES (however, this dependency can be removed during the restore). |
| Table with a sequence | The sequence. |
| Views | The tables used in the view's SELECT statement. |
| Interleaved tables | The parent table in the interleaved hierarchy. |
Users and privileges
To restore your users and privilege grants, you can do a cluster backup and restore the cluster to a fresh cluster with no user data.
If you are not doing a full cluster restore, the table-level privileges need to be granted to the users after the restore is complete. To do this, backup the system.users table, restore users and their passwords, and then grant the table-level privileges.
Restore types
You can either restore from a full backup or from a full backup with incremental backups, based on the backup files you include:
| Restore Type | Parameters |
|---|---|
| Full backup | Include only the path to the full backup. |
| Full backup + incremental backups |
If the full backup and incremental backups were sent to the same destination, include only the path to the full backup (e.g., RESTORE FROM 'full_backup_location';).If the incremental backups were sent to a different destination from the full backup, include the path to the full backup as the first argument and the subsequent incremental backups from oldest to newest as the following arguments (e.g., RESTORE FROM 'full_backup_location', 'incremental_location_1', 'incremental_location_2';). |
Performance
The RESTORE process minimizes its impact to the cluster's performance by distributing work to all nodes. Subsets of the restored data (known as ranges) are evenly distributed among randomly selected nodes, with each range initially restored to only one node. Once the range is restored, the node begins replicating it others.
When a RESTORE fails or is canceled, partially restored data is properly cleaned up. This can have a minor, temporary impact on cluster performance.
Viewing and controlling restore jobs
After CockroachDB successfully initiates a restore, it registers the restore as a job, which you can view with SHOW JOBS.
After the restore has been initiated, you can control it with PAUSE JOB, RESUME JOB, and CANCEL JOB.
If initiated correctly, the statement returns when the restore is finished or if it encounters an error. In some cases, the restore can continue after an error has been returned (the error message will tell you that the restore has resumed in background).
Examples
Restore a cluster
New in v20.1: To restore a full cluster:
> RESTORE FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/test-cluster';
Restore a database
> RESTORE DATABASE bank FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';
RESTORE DATABASE can only be used if the entire database was backed up.
Restore a table
To restore a single table:
> RESTORE bank.customers FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';
To restore multiple tables:
> RESTORE bank.customers, bank.accounts FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';
Restore from incremental backups
New in v20.1: Restoring from incremental backups requires previous full and incremental backups. To restore from a destination containing the full backup, as well as the incremental backups (stored as subdirectories):
> RESTORE FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/test-cluster';
To explicitly point to where your incremental backups are, provide the previous full and incremental backup locations in a comma-separated list. In this example, -weekly is the full backup and the two -nightly are incremental backups.
> RESTORE bank.customers \
FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly', 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-28-nightly', 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-29-nightly';
If you are restoring from HTTP storage, provide the previous full and incremental backup locations in a comma-separated list. You cannot use the simplified syntax.
Advanced examples
For examples of advanced BACKUP and RESTORE use cases, see Back up and Restore Data - Advanced Options. Advanced examples include:
- Incremental backups with a specified destination
- Backup with revision history and point-in-time restore
- Locality-aware backup and restore
- New in v20.1: Encrypted backup and restore
- Restore into a different database
- Remove the foreign key before restore
- Restoring users from
system.usersbackup
See also
BACKUP- Backup and Restore Data
- Back up and Restore Data - Advanced Options
- Configure Replication Zones
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