Overview

In AWS, Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora provide multiple mechanisms for data backup, restoration, and cloning — ensuring durability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

This guide explains automated backups, manual snapshots, restore strategies, and Aurora cloning — everything kaptaindevops needs to manage backups like a pro.

Automated Backups

What It Is?

Automated Backups are daily, system-managed backups created by the RDS service during a defined backup window.

RDS automatically performs:

• Daily full database backup, and
• Transaction log backups every 5 minutes

What This Means?

• You can restore to any point in time up to 5 minutes ago.
• Retention period: 1 to 35 days
• Can be disabled by setting retention to 0

Example (kaptaindevops):

He enables 7-day automated backups for his MySQL RDS instance, allowing point-in-time recovery in case of data corruption or accidental changes.

Aurora Note

• Aurora also performs automated backups,
• Retention: 1–35 days,
• Cannot be disabled (unlike RDS).