AWS Cognito - how to create a backup?

Question

We are currently moving our Auth services to AWS Cognito. As it's crucial to have the user profiles + data safe, we need to have a backup of the main user pool. We've noticed that there is an option to Import Users via a .csv file with the headers equal to the pool attributes but there is no option to create the .csv automatically. Does anyone know of a solution which automatically generates such file?The point is to protect the user profiles of accidental delete of the whole user pool (by accident, let's say a tired developer on Friday night)? I've personally tried to implement a workaround solution by doing all manual work (getting headers, users, mapping them and creating the csv) but that is not very reliable.

Answer 1

Amazon has released a Cognito User Profiles Export Reference Architecture for exporting/importing users from a user pool. There are limitations:

• Passwords not backed up; users will need to reset
• Pools using MFA are not supported
• Cognito sub attributes will be new, so if the system depends on them, they need to be copied to a custom user attribute
• Federated users also pose challenges WRT sub
• Advanced security - no user history is exported
• No support for pools that allow the option of either phone or email usernames
• No support for tracked devices

Answer 2

I know I am late to the party but leaving this here for future searches.

I too faced the same issue while working with Cognito and thus made a tool to take backups and restore them to userpools.

You can find it here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cognito-backup-restore

This can be used via cli or using imports (incase you want to write your own wrapper or script). Please suggest any improvements: https://github.com/rahulpsd18/cognito-backup-restore

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This is still under development, as I plan to make use of Cognito User Pool Import Job instead of using aws-sdk's adminCreateUser to create users while restoring to improve upon the current implementation. But it works fine for now.

Cross-Region Cognito Replication will be implemented too once I fine tune the restore process.