AWS

AWS RDS Backups

Leave a comment

AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) backups ensure that your data is recoverable and able to be replicated in a separate RDS datastore.

The characteristics of RDS Backups include:

  • Automatic Backups:
    • Daily full backup of the database (taken during the backup window)
    • Transaction logs are backed-up by RDS every 5 minutes
    • Ability to resore to any point in time (from oldest backup to 5 minutes ago)
    • 1 to 35 days of retention, set retention to 0 disables automatic backups.
  • Manual DB Snapshots
    • Manually triggered by the administer.
    • Retention of backup taken manually are as long as you want.
  • Reduce cost of stopped RDS backups by taking snapshot of RDS, deleting the RDS, and restoring the the snapshot to new RDS when it is needed again.

Aurora backups have slightly different characteristics:

  • Automatic backups
    • 1 to 35 days (cannot be disabled)
    • Point-in-time recovery at any point in backup timeframe.
  • Manual DB Snapshots
    • Manually triggered by the administer.
    • Retention of backup taken manually are as long as you want.

Restore RDS and Aurora options:

  • Restoring a RDS / Aurora backup or a snapshot creates a new database.
  • Restoring MySQL RDS database from S3
    • Create a backup of your on-premises database
    • Store it on Amazon S3 (object storage)
    • Restore the backup file onto a new RDS instance running MySQL
  • Restoring MySQL Aurora cluster from S3
    • Create a backup of your on-premises database using Percona XtraBackup
    • Store the backup file on Amazon S3
    • Restore the backup file onto a new Aurora cluster running MySQL

Aurora Database Cloning

  • Create a new Aurora DB Cluster from an existing one.
  • Faster than snapshot and restore
  • Uses copy-on-write protocal
    • initially, the new DB cluster uses the same data volume as the original DB cluser (fast and efficient – no copying is needed)
    • When updates are made to the new DB cluster data, then additional storage is allocated and data is copied to be separated.
  • Very fast and cost-effective
  • Useful to create test or development database from production database without impacting production database.

Leave a Reply