[Dunedan]

Oh yes. Backups for DynamoDB are a pain in the ass, especially as AWS doesn't offer an out-of-the-box solution for that.

That Data Pipeline + EMR solution mentioned in the blog post (here is a better link for it: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/datapipeline/latest/DeveloperGui...) has several drawbacks:

- too many moving parts, especially given the track record of EMR

- might not even be available when your requirement is to keep the data in the same AWS region as the DynamoDB table, as only five regions support Data Pipeline

The best approach I've seen so far is to use DynamoDB Streams and an AWS Lambda function to create incremental backups in an versioned S3-bucket. dynamodb-replicator (https://github.com/mapbox/dynamodb-replicator) implements that together with some scripts to do management tasks like back filling an S3 bucket with data which is already in DynamoDB or joining incremental backups into a single file.

It's still pretty unpolished and definitely needs some love, but I think it's the right approach.