Managing snapshots and backups in Neo4j AuraDB

When you use AuraDB you have the benefit of automatic snapshots and backups triggered for you at key moments of the lifetime of your AuraDB Instance. Your data is kept safe (encryption at rest) and ready to load on cloud storage, removing the need to manually manage it.

Within AuraDB you have 3 types of snapshots and backups:

• Scheduled
• Load
• On-demand

The very first time you create an AuraDB Instance, when it becomes available we back it up and provide a snapshot. Then, every time we do a maintenance of the service (i.e. database engine gets updated, new features) a back-up and a snapshot are produced. There is no defined cadence to this and it can happen any time but it is completely transparent to your operations. These snapshots are part of the Scheduled snapshots.

When you load a dump file (via the Aura console or via the command line push-to-cloud ) then another snapshot is triggered immediately afterwards and will appear as Load in your snapshots tab.

Finally to give you even better control to manage your data we now offer On-Demand snapshots that you can trigger at any time, providing that no other types of backup are running and your AuraDB Instance is not loading / updating.

Finally, in the list of snapshots you will clearly see the date and time, and also what type of snapshot / backup this was so as to make it easier for you to manage and find what you need.