Practical backup strategy in 2025?

Question & Answer
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Hi dear QuickSight community,

We are transitioning from Tableau and exploring QuickSight as a potential replacement.

However, the backup topic seems a bit scattered and incomplete. There is a new BundleExportJob endpoint added - it’s great but only works for one dashboard and its upstream dependencies.

An account is not only about assets but also about VPC connections, memberships, groups, etc. The first issue is that BundleExportJob doesn’t explain the coverage of this export. For example, will it restore sharing to a specific group, but not the group itself? And even if it’s only about sharing, the ID of a group in a new account could be different, so there could be no match by group ID.

The core question is: how can we ‘snapshot’ our account for:

  1. Backup purposes in case we need to restore by overwriting the current account setup (probably delete the subscription first and then reinstall again)
  2. To support deploying multi-region environments in the same subscription (deploying VPC connections given that in a new region we have another set of IP addresses, datasources, themes, etc.)

It seems there are 2 aspects:

  • Content assets that are region-based (datasources/sets, analyses, dashboards, Q&A, etc.)
  • Subscription configuration that resides in the Home region (members, groups, themes, and what else?)

Also, if BundleExport is becoming the new standard, how do we supplement such exports with the rest of the content? For BundleExport there is a counterpart BundleImport, but what about custom JSON exports? How do we handle those?

What is the recommended/feasible approach to backup/deploy in multi-region? I’ve watched several YouTube videos from the official channel but found them either a bit outdated (2-3 years ago when even CLI was a previous version) or recent but quite shallow (like “here is a bundle export API” but not covering nuances or alignment with previous videos about the general approach).

Based on my research, it seems feasible to have a kind of ‘for’ loop over a list of each type of asset we have in QuickSight and export each one. But I’m concerned this could be a dull approach and we might miss something.

Thanks

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Hello @Karmaknight1369

You are right, this process would take more development time. The primary purpose of the BundleExportJob and BundleImportJob is for backing up QuickSight specific resources.

When we have done similar projects for our clients we faced the same challenges and have had to create systems that match what you described here:

You can also tie in something like EventBridge to trigger some of these task automatically when QuickSight assets are updated/added/deleted.

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