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AWS Backup aims to become a centralized place for managing backups. If possible, AWS Backup uses existing features to create backups (e.g., RDS snapshots). Sometimes, AWS Backup is the only way to create a backup (e.g., EFS file systems).

Backups (sometimes also referred to as recovery points) are stored in vaults. It is possible to protect a vault with an optional resource-based policy, e.g., to prevent anyone from deleting backups. The backup plan defines when backups are made and for how long the backups are stored. To be more precise, you only define when a backup job should start. After that, a job tries to start within a configurable period. You can also configure a timeout for the job. Finally, you assign resources to backup plans based on tags or direct assignments. After a disaster, you restore a backup by creating a restore job.

Supported data sources

AWS Backup backs up and restores the following data sources:

DynamoDB tables

EFS file systems (supports cold storage to save cost 12 )

) EBS volumes

RDS databases (except Amazon Aurora)

Storage Gateway

The following data sources are not supported yet:

S3 buckets

EC2 instances

Elastisearch domains

Redshift clusters

EMR clusters

Cognito user pools

DocumentDB clusters

ElastiCache clusters

Neptune clusters

CloudDirectory directories

…

Keep in mind that restores are more complicated than a single click if you manage your infrastructure with CloudFormation. You should still practice restoring your data regularly.

Backup Consistency

If you create a backup, you might expect that all data up to a point in time where the backup was triggered appears in the backup. The following table shows what you can expect in reality.