Backups & PITR

Tablyne gives you a single panel to manage both kinds of DynamoDB backup: on-demand snapshots and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR).

Opening the backups panel

Right-click a table in the table list (or open it from the table settings) and choose Backups. The panel loads two things in parallel for the selected table:

• the current PITR status (DescribeContinuousBackups)
• the list of on-demand backups (ListBackups)

Everything is scoped to the table you opened it on, using the active profile and region.

Point-in-Time Recovery

PITR keeps a continuous backup of your table so you could restore it to any second within the retention window (up to 35 days on AWS).

The PITR card shows the live state:

• Enabled — Tablyne displays the earliest and latest restorable timestamps reported by AWS.
• Disabled — a single button activates it.

Toggling calls UpdateContinuousBackups with the new value. Turning PITR on or off is the only PITR action Tablyne performs — see the limitations below.

PITR active
  earliest restorable: 2026-05-13 09:41:00
  latest restorable:   2026-06-16 14:02:11

PITR is required before you can run an S3 export (ExportTableToPointInTime). If export fails complaining about continuous backups, enable PITR here first.

On-demand backups

On-demand backups are full, named snapshots that live independently of the table and never expire until you delete them.

Creating a backup

Click Create backup. Tablyne pre-fills a name in the form tablename-YYYY-MM-DD which you can edit, then confirm. It issues CreateBackup and refreshes the list. A freshly created backup first appears as CREATING and becomes AVAILABLE once DynamoDB finishes.

The backup list

Each row shows:

Column	Source
Name	the backup name you chose
Status	CREATING, AVAILABLE or DELETED
Size	human-readable bytes (B / KB / MB)
Created	local timestamp, or — if not reported

Deleting a backup

The Delete action on a row asks for confirmation (naming the backup) before issuing DeleteBackup. This is irreversible — the snapshot is gone. Deleting a backup does not touch the live table.

Limitations (be aware)

Tablyne’s backup support is deliberately scoped to the safe, common operations. As of now:

• No restore action. Tablyne can create, list and delete on-demand backups and toggle PITR, but it does not yet perform a restore — neither RestoreTableFromBackup nor RestoreTableToPointInTime. To restore, use the AWS Console or CLI. Restoring always creates a new table, so it’s a deliberate, infrequent operation we’d rather you do explicitly.
• PITR is a toggle only. Tablyne reads the status and flips it on/off; it does not let you pick a restore point.

On local endpoints

Backups and PITR are AWS-cloud features. If you’re connected to DynamoDB Local, these calls may be unsupported or behave as no-ops depending on your emulator. Use a real AWS profile to exercise the full flow.

Related

• Streams live viewer — tail change events instead of snapshotting.
• S3 import & export — bulk move data; export needs PITR enabled.
• Table settings — capacity, TTL, deletion protection.
• Concepts: the backups learn guide.