How to schedule and maintain RDS backups

Follow these steps to schedule RDS backup:

To go to RDS section, select RDS from the Main Menu.

Under RDS table menu, select Schedule Backup.

In the upper section of the RDS Scheduler, choose how frequently you want to create DB Snapshot.

Occurrence:

Hourly – The snapshot is taken every given number of hours. Additionally, you can specify start and end time, e.g. to take a snapshot every 2 hours between 8AM and 7PM, this is how your setup looks:

If start and end time are skipped, the snapshot will be taken every given number of hours around the clock.

Daily – DB Snapshot is taken every selected day and time, e.g to take a snapshot every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9PM, this is how your setup looks:

Monthly – DB Snapshot is taken every given day of the month at a given time, e.g. to take a snapshot every 3rd day of the month at 8AM, this is how your setup looks:

You can setup multiple schedulers for the same RDS Instance and mix different frequencies if necessary. For example, to take a snapshot every hour from 9AM to 5PM and another one daily at 11PM, this is how your setup looks:

In the next section, optional settings can be configured:

Description – DB snapshot description

Copy Snapshot to Different Region – when checked, this option copies the new DB Snapshot to the selected AWS region. You can select multiple destination regions. DB Snapshot is copied to all AWS regions simultaneously.

Click Save.

You can edit, delete, or suspend scheduler by clicking appropriate action in the scheduler table.

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Schedule Maintenance (retention period) of the old DB Snapshots:

Amazon AWS allows only 50 manual snapshots to be kept: the error “cannot create more than 50 manual snapshots,” may appear following extended scheduler use. Schedule retention of old DB Snapshots to prevent this:

Two options define which DB Snapshots are not deleted:

Keep All From Last – Keeps all DB Snapshots created within the last x periods (select period as hours, days, weeks, months, or years), e.g. to keep all DN Snapshots created within the last 45 days, this is how your setup looks:

Keep One Per Period From Last – Keeps the DB Snapshots created last in the given period (hours, days, weeks, months, or years), e.g. to keep one DB Snapshot per week from the last 8 weeks, this is how your setup looks:

After configuring maintenance criteria, click Save.

The maintenance process runs once per day.

All DB Snapshots that do not match the scheduler are deleted.

Create multiple schedules to setup an advanced maintenance plan for RDS. For example, to setup maintenance to keep all DB Snapshots from the last 7 days, 1 DB Snapshot per week from the last 4 weeks, and 1 DB Snapshot per month from the last 4 months, this is how your setup looks: