Finding and exporting your Amazon DynamoDB data

What it holds

DynamoDB keeps key-value and document items organized into tables. A table snapshot contains retained items and attributes; earlier item states require an available recovery point or separately retained change data.

Where Amazon DynamoDB shows the size

1. Open Tables, select a table, and inspect its Overview size and item count.
2. Run aws dynamodb list-tables, then aws dynamodb describe-table --table-name MyTable --query "Table.[ItemCount,TableSizeBytes,CreationDateTime]" for each table in every Region.
3. Sum TableSizeBytes and divide by 1073741824 for binary GB, allowing for the statistics refresh delay.

Plan and admin role. Sizing needs dynamodb:ListTables and dynamodb:DescribeTable. Exporting needs PITR enabled, export authorization and destination S3 permissions, with relevant key permissions for encrypted destinations.

Exporting the full history

1. Enable recovery with aws dynamodb update-continuous-backups --table-name MyTable --point-in-time-recovery-specification PointInTimeRecoveryEnabled=true.
2. Choose Exports to S3 > Export to S3, select Full export and DynamoDB JSON or Amazon Ion. CLI equivalent: aws dynamodb export-table-to-point-in-time --table-arn arn:aws:dynamodb:REGION:ACCOUNT:table/MyTable --s3-bucket my-bucket --export-format DYNAMODB_JSON.
3. Wait for COMPLETED, then collect gzip files under AWSDynamoDB/ExportId/data/ and the manifests, including manifest-summary.json.

PITR recovery windows are configurable from 1 to 35 days. Full exports are snapshots; incremental exports describe changes within windows of 15 minutes to 24 hours.

Exports are asynchronous and do not consume table read capacity. Export volume, S3 storage and requests incur charges.

Do not treat exported items as an atomic record of multi-item transactions; the export is not transactionally consistent.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.