How to Activate Backup Data in Amazon Redshift Without Restores or ETL

Blog written by Peleg Kazaz, senior product manager, Eon published Jan. 9, 2026

Summary:

Eon stores database backups as tables stored in Amazon S3
Eon allows customers to grant Redshift with access to their backups
Amazon Redshift can query those tables directly as point-in-time datasets
Teams can analyze historical data instantly with no restores, ETL, or duplicate analytics environments

Eon integrates with Amazon Redshift, allowing you to query database backup data in place.

Why use backup data for analytics?
Because backups already hold any critical data across the organization.

They include long-range context and consistent point-in-time versions that production systems rarely preserve. When that data becomes usable:

You answer historical questions without rebuilding environments
You cut out redundant analytics copies and pipelines
You work from a single governed source of truth
You reuse the same datasets for investigations, validation, compliance, and BI

What does it mean to query backups in Amazon Redshift?
It means backups are no longer expensive and useless. Instead, they form a rich data lake that already holds critical data, instantly ready for analytics or AI/ML workflows.

Eon stores database backups as deduplicated tables in Amazon S3. With the Redshift integration, those tables appear directly in Redshift as point-in-time datasets you can query immediately.

If you want to see how a table looked last week, validate a change, or compare before-and-after states, you query the backup itself rather than a rehydrated environment.

Key benefits of querying backups in Redshift

Instant point-in-time analytics without waiting for restores
No ETL pipelines or duplicate analytics clusters
Trusted baselines for audits, investigations, and debugging
Lower cost by eliminating redundant environments and copies
Cross-cloud context via Eon’s unified catalog when needed

Click to enlarge

Query backup data directly in Amazon Redshift

How the Redshift integration works
A simple, AWS-native flow:

Eon continuously stores backups as deduplicated Hive-partitioned tables
Eon introduces a modern backup format that consists of Hive-partitioned tables stored in Amazon S3
You choose which backups to share with Redshift
Eon grants read-only access while preserving immutability and governance controls
Redshift queries in place
Amazon Redshift discovers and queries the tables directly in S3

The result: Redshift treats your backups as point-in-time datasets ready for immediate analysis.

What teams do with Redshift-queryable backups
Analytics and BI without rebuilds
Run Redshift queries on historical snapshots to validate changes, investigate incidents, or analyze trends without restoring anything first.

Faster audits and compliance checks
Search and query long-retained point-in-time data directly, instead of waiting on exports or restore jobs.

Operational insight and investigations
Backups provide a clean historical truth for debugging, root-cause analysis, and validating system behavior over time.

How Eon keeps backups usable and secure
Making backups queryable does not mean making them risky.

Baseline protections stay on by default: