Manual Snapshots

Taking a manual backup of your database.

In addition to automated databsae backups, there are often times when you want to take an explicit backup of the database, just ahead of a major software release, or to refresh your staging enviornment. With AWS RDS these backups are called manual snapshots. RDS creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance and not just individual databases. They are stored in Amazon S3 but they are not in a customer accessible bucket.

  1. With your instance selected from the list of databases . Select Actions -> Take Snapshot manual snapshot

  2. On the Take DB Snapshot screen, enter a name for your snapshot (e.g. manual-snapshot-rdspg-fcj-labs) and click Take Snapshot. manual snapshot

  3. As the snapshot is creating, you will be taken to the Snapshots page in the AWS RDS Console. Let’s go to the list of databases and take a look at the instance status. You should see its backing up. manual snapshot

  4. Once the database status returns to available return to the list of snapshots . Review all the snapshot details by scrolling to the right. manual snapshot

(OPTIONAL) AWS CLI

Alternatively you can take a manual snapshot of the instance using the AWS CLI as shown below:

AWS CLI