Migrate with downtime

You use downtime migration to move less than 100GB of data from self-hosted database to a Timescale Cloud service.

Downtime migration uses the native PostgreSQL pg_dump and pg_restore commands. If you are migrating from self-hosted TimescaleDB, this method works for compressed hypertables without having to decompress data before you begin.

Important

If you want to migrate more than 400GB of data, create a Timescale Console support request, or send us an email at support@timescale.com saying how much data you want to migrate. We will pre-provision your Timescale Cloud instance for you.

However, downtime migration for large amounts of data takes a large amount of time. For more than 100GB of data, best practice is to follow live migration.

This page shows you how to move your data from a self-hosted database to a Timescale Cloud service using shell commands.

Best practice is to use an Ubuntu EC2 instance hosted in the same region as your Timescale Cloud service as a migration machine. That is, the machine you run the commands on to move your data from your source database to your target Timescale Cloud service.

Before you migrate your data:

• Create a target Timescale Cloud service.

  Each Timescale Cloud service has a single database that supports the most popular extensions. Timescale Cloud services do not support tablespaces, and there is no superuser associated with a Timescale service. We recommend creating a Timescale Cloud instance with at least 8 CPUs for a smoother migration experience. A higher-spec instance can significantly reduce the overall migration window.

• To ensure that maintenance does not run while migration is in progress, best practice is to adjust the maintenance window.

• Install the PostgreSQL client tools on your migration machine.

  This includes psql, pg_dump, and pg_dumpall.

• Install the GNU implementation of sed.

  Run sed --version on your migration machine. GNU sed identifies itself as GNU software, BSD sed returns sed: illegal option -- -.

To move your data from a self-hosted database to a Timescale Cloud service: