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Backups

Backups

  • Automated Backups as well as Snapshots are stored in S3
  • The S3 buckets are AWS managed, hence not visible in user accounts
  • Snapshots are manually generated Backups.
  • Snapshots and Backups are of the instance and not a specific database
  • First Snapshot is a full snapshot. All snapshots then onwards are incremental
  • Snapshots don't expire & need to be manually deleted. They survive deletion of the instance
  • Automated Backups happen once per day. The backup window is defined per instance.
  • Every 5 minutes, database transaction logs are stored to S3
  • Automated Backups are deleted automatically by AWS depending on retention period.
  • Retention period could be 0 i.e. automated backups disabled or upto 35 days
  • Backups can be copied cross region. This is not default & needs to be enabled explicitly

Restore

  • While performing a restore, RDS first creates a new RDS Instance with new address
  • While restoring from Automated Backups, one can restore it upto a precise 5 minute window
  • First closest Snapshot is restored and then transaction logs are applied till the target timestamp
  • RDS restores can take time. Hence RTO is larger