Does DynamoDB have backups?

Yes. DynamoDB has two built-in backup features: on-demand backups — full table snapshots kept until you delete them — and point-in-time recovery (PITR), continuous backups that can restore a table to any second within the last 1–35 days. Neither impacts table performance or consumes capacity.

On-demand backups

An on-demand backup is a full snapshot you create manually (or on a schedule via AWS Backup) for long-term retention and compliance. Backups work on tables of any size, don't affect performance, and are kept until you explicitly delete them. Through AWS Backup you can also copy them across accounts and Regions and transition older backups to cold storage.

Point-in-time recovery (PITR)

PITR is DynamoDB's continuous backup: once enabled, it provides per-second recovery points for a window you set between 1 and 35 days (35 by default). You never schedule anything — restoring creates a new table at exactly the moment you choose, including across Regions. Disabling and re-enabling PITR resets the window.

No performance tax

Both backup paths run out-of-band: they use no provisioned capacity and have no impact on the performance or availability of the live table. PITR is also the prerequisite for exporting a table to S3.

What they cost

Free of capacity is not free of money, and the rates are per GB of table size, so the bill scales with the table whether or not anything changes. Current us-east-1 rates, read from the AWS pricing API on 2026-07-28:

Run that for a 100 GB table. Storage alone is $25.00 a month. Turning PITR on adds $20.00, an 80% surcharge that takes the table to $45.00, and it is charged on the size of the table rather than on how much of it changed. One on-demand backup held for a month adds $10.00; keep a monthly snapshot for a year and by month twelve the twelve copies cost $120.00 a month, nearly five times the table they protect.

Restoring the same table costs $15.00 once, and it lands in a new table, so you pay storage on both until you drop one.

None of that argues against backups. It argues for a retention policy on on-demand snapshots, because the copies you forgot about bill at the same rate as the ones you would actually restore from.

Go deeper

The backups & PITR guide covers restore mechanics and costs, the pricing calculator estimates the table behind them, and DynoTable gives you a desktop view of the tables you're protecting.

References

• Point-in-time backups for DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide
• Using on-demand backup and restore for DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide
• What is Amazon DynamoDB? — Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide
• Amazon DynamoDB on-demand pricing

Last verified 2026-07-13 against the official AWS documentation linked above.

Rates read from the AWS public pricing API on 2026-07-28 (us-east-1 offer published 2026-07-22) and cross-checked against the DynamoDB pricing page the same day. Prices change; re-check before you budget from them.