Backups in Managed Service for OpenSearch

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Updated at January 27, 2026

Managed Service for OpenSearch supports automatic and manual index backups.

For clusters running an unsupported DBMS version, restoring from backups is not available.

Creating a backup

Backups are only created on running clusters.

Automatic backup takes place every hour, and you cannot turn it off.

Learn about creating manual backups in Managing backups.

Storing backups in Managed Service for OpenSearch:

All automatic and manual backups are incremental. This means the initial backup contains all index segments, and all subsequent backups contain only the increment, i.e., changes made since the previous backup. This saves storage space and reduces the cost of using resources.
When requesting information about a backup, you will get the full size of restorable data, but you only pay for the incremental part.
Backups are stored in object storage as binaries.
After a backup is created, it is compressed for storage.
Automatic backups are stored for two weeks, and you cannot change that period. Manual backups are stored until the user deletes them.
Quotas and limits for cluster storage do not apply to backup storage.
Backups are stored in an object storage and do not take up space in the cluster storage. If there are N GB of free space in the cluster, the first N GB of backups are stored free of charge.

For more information, see the Managed Service for OpenSearch pricing policy.

To test how backup works, you can restore a cluster from a backup and check the integrity of your data.