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Backfilling historical data

Late-arriving data is a fact of life. Your daily_sales_load Dag has been running fine, but the order data for April 20-22 only landed in raw_orders today, leaving three holes in daily_summary. The fix is a backfill. The Dag is already active, so you'll see a scheduled run for today alongside the backfill runs you create.

  1. Run airflow backfill create --dag-id daily_sales_load --from-date 2026-04-20 --to-date 2026-04-22 --max-active-runs 1 in the terminal.
  2. Wait about 30 seconds for the backfill runs to complete.
  3. Run airflow dags list-runs daily_sales_load to see all runs.

Look at the run_id column in the output. What prefix do the backfill runs start with?

This exercise is part of the course

Building Data Pipelines with Airflow

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