Backups

Managed Service for ClickHouse provides automatic and manual database backups. Backups take up space in the storage allocated to the cluster. If the total amount of data and backups exceeds the amount of storage, the excess is billed.

Backups are automatically created once a day and stored for 7 days. You can't disable automatic backups or change the retention period.

The backup process start time is set when a cluster is created or updated. The backup will start within half an hour of the specified time. By default, the backup process starts at 22:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

To restore a cluster from a backup, follow the instructions.

Creating backups

Backups can be made automatically and manually. Regardless of the type, backups are created incrementally:

• When creating another backup, data parts are checked for uniqueness.
• If there are identical data parts in at least one of the existing backups and they are no older than 30 days, they are not duplicated.

Backup data is stored only for the MergeTree engine family. For other engines, backups only store table schemas. Learn more about engines in the documentation for ClickHouse.

Storing backups

Backups are stored in Yandex internal storage as binary files and are encrypted using GPG. Each cluster has its own encryption keys.

All backups (automatic or manual) are stored for 7 days.

Checking backups

Checking backup integrity

Backup integrity is checked on synthetic data using integration tests available in the service. For user clusters, backups currently aren't checked.

Checking backup recovery

To test the backup feature, restore a cluster from a backup and check the integrity of your data.