Backups in Managed Service for OpenSearch

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Updated at August 14, 2025

Managed Service for OpenSearch supports automatic and manual index backups.

Creating backup

Backups are only created on running clusters.

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

For more information about creating a backup manually, see 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.
Backup storage is not subject to quotas or limits for cluster storage space.
Backups are stored in object storage and do not take up space in cluster storage. If there are N free GB of space in the cluster, the storage of the first N GB of backups is 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.