A backup, or recovery point, represents the content of a resource, such as an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume or Amazon DynamoDB table, at a specified time. Recovery point is a term that refers generally to the different backups in AWS services, such as Amazon EBS snapshots and DynamoDB backups. The terms recovery point and backup are used interchangeably.
AWS Backup saves recovery points in backup vaults, which you can organize according to your business needs. For example, you can save a set of resources that contain financial information for fiscal year 2020. When you need to recover a resource, you can use either the AWS Backup console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to find and recover the resource you need.
Each recovery point has a unique ID. The unique ID is at the end of the recovery point's Amazon Resource Name (ARN). For examples of recovery point ARNs and unique IDs, see the table in Resources and operations.
Important
To avoid additional charges, configure your retention policy with a warm storage duration of at least one week. For more information, see Metering, costs, and billing for AWS Backup.
The following sections provide an overview of the basic backup management tasks in AWS Backup.
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