RESTORE

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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.

Functional details

Restore targets

You can restore entire 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.

The notion of "restoring a database" simply restores all of the tables and views that belong to the database, but does not create the database. For more information, see Target Database.

Because this process is designed for disaster recovery, CockroachDB expects that the tables do not currently exist in the target database. This means the target database must have not have tables or views with the same name as the restored table or view. If any of the restore target's names are being used, you can:

• DROP TABLE, DROP VIEW, or DROP SEQUENCE and then restore them. Note that a sequence cannot be dropped while it is being used in a column's DEFAULT expression, so those expressions must be dropped before the sequence is dropped, and recreated after the sequence is recreated. The setval function can be used to set the value of the sequence to what it was previously.
• Restore the table or view into a different database.

Object dependencies

Dependent objects must be restored at the same time as the objects they depend on.

Target database

By default, tables and views are restored into a database with the name of the database from which they were backed up. However, also consider:

• You can choose to change the target database.
• If it no longer exists, you must create the target database.

The target database must have not have tables or views with the same name as the tables or views you're restoring.

Users and privileges

Table and view users/privileges are not restored. Restored tables and views instead inherit the privileges of the database into which they're restored.

However, every backup includes system.users, so you can restore users and their passwords.

Table-level privileges must be granted to users after the restore is complete.

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.

Point-in-time restore

If the full or incremental backup was taken with revision history, you can restore the data as it existed at the specified point-in-time within the revision history captured by that backup.

If you do not specify a point-in-time, the data will be restored to the backup timestamp; that is, the restore will work as if the data was backed up without revision history.

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.

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.

Synopsis

Required privileges

Only members of the admin role can run RESTORE. By default, the root user belongs to the admin role.

Parameters

Backup file URLs

The URL for your backup's locations must use the following format:

[scheme]://[host]/[path]?[parameters]

• ¹ If the AUTH parameter is implicit, all GCS connections use Google's default authentication strategy. If the AUTH parameter is default, the cloudstorage.gs.default.key cluster setting must be set to the contents of a service account file which will be used during authentication. If the AUTH parameter is not specified, the cloudstorage.gs.default.key setting will be used if it is non-empty, otherwise the implicit behavior is used.

• ² 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_ca cluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from HTTPS URLs.

• ³ The file system backup location on the NFS drive is relative to the path specified by the --external-io-dir flag set while starting the node. If the flag is set to disabled, then imports from local directories and NFS drives are disabled.

• ⁴ A custom root CA can be appended to the system's default CAs by setting the cloudstorage.http.custom_ca cluster setting, which will be used when verifying certificates from an S3-compatible service.

• ⁵ The AWS_REGION parameter 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

Restore option list

You can include the following options as key-value pairs in the kv_option_list to control the restore process's behavior.

into_db

• Description: If you want to restore a table or view into a database other than the one it originally existed in, you can change the target database. This is useful if you want to restore a table that currently exists, but do not want to drop it.
• Key: into_db
• Value: The name of the database you want to use
• Example: WITH into_db = 'newdb'

skip_missing_foreign_keys

• Description: If you want to restore a table with a foreign key but do not want to restore the table it references, you can drop the Foreign Key constraint from the table and then have it restored.
• Key: skip_missing_foreign_keys
• Value: No value
• Example: WITH skip_missing_foreign_keys

skip_missing_sequences

• Description: If you want to restore a table that depends on a sequence but do not want to restore the sequence it references, you can drop the sequence dependency from a table (i.e., the DEFAULT expression that uses the sequence) and then have it restored.
• Key: skip_missing_sequences
• Value: No value
• Example: WITH skip_missing_sequences

Examples

Restore a single table

> RESTORE bank.customers FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';

Restore multiple tables

> RESTORE bank.customers, bank.accounts FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';

Restore an entire database

> RESTORE DATABASE bank FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly';

Point-in-time restore

> RESTORE bank.customers FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '2017-02-26 10:00:00';

Restore from 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';

Point-in-time restore from 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' \
AS OF SYSTEM TIME '2017-02-28 10:00:00';

Restore into a different database

By default, tables and views are restored to the database they originally belonged to. However, using the into_db option, you can control the target database.

> RESTORE bank.customers \
FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
WITH into_db = 'newdb';

Remove the foreign key before restore

By default, tables with Foreign Key constraints must be restored at the same time as the tables they reference. However, using the skip_missing_foreign_keys option you can remove the Foreign Key constraint from the table and then restore it.

> RESTORE bank.accounts \
FROM 'gs://acme-co-backup/database-bank-2017-03-27-weekly' \
WITH skip_missing_foreign_keys;

Restoring users from system.users backup

Every full backup contains the system.users table, which you can use to restore your cluster's usernames and their hashed passwords. However, to restore them, you must restore the system.users table into a new database because you cannot drop the existing system.users table.

After it's restored into a new database, you can write the restored users table data to the cluster's existing system.users table.

> RESTORE system.users \
FROM 'azure://acme-co-backup/table-users-2017-03-27-full?AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY=hash&AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME=acme-co' \
WITH into_db = 'newdb';

> INSERT INTO system.users SELECT * FROM newdb.users;

> DROP TABLE newdb.users;

See also

• BACKUP
• Configure Replication Zones

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