Turn off backups - AWS Control Tower

Turn off backups

You can turn off backups for your resources in accounts that are enrolled in AWS Control Tower, either during landing zone setup, or when you update your landing zone.

Two main steps are required to turn off backups: first, turn off the AWS Backup baseline on each OU that has backups enabled, then, turn off backups for your landing zone.

First step: Turn off backups on OUs

If AWS Backup is enabled, you must disable the AWS Backup baseline from all OUs before you can turn off AWS Backup for your landing zone.

To disable the AWS Backup baseline on an OU, you can call the DisableBaseline API. The nested OUs inherit this status, so that the AWS Backup baseline baseline is disabled for them also.

Example command:

aws controltower disable-baseline --enabled-baseline-identifier Enabled-baseline-ARN

When you disable the the AWS Backup baseline, AWS Control Tower cleans up the following resources:

  • All stacksets related to AWS Backup

  • All controls related to AWS Backup

Note

The local vault is retained even though the stacksets are deleted, because the retention policy on the local vault is set to Retain. It preserves your data.

Next step: Turn off AWS Backup for your landing zone

After the prerequisite is met by turning off backups to your OUs, to turn off backups from the AWS Control Tower console, navigate to the Landing zone settings page. Choose Disable backup.

When you turn off AWS Backup, AWS Control Tower changes the following resources:

  • Removes all stacksets related to AWS Backup

  • Deactivates all controls related to AWS Backup in the Security OU

  • De-registers the Delegated admin account for AWS Backup administration

  • Removes AWS Control Tower governance (for CloudTrail, AWS Config, and so forth) from the AWS Backup Administrator and Central Backup accounts

  • AWS Control Tower retains the AWS Backup vaults and Amazon S3 bucket resources containing your data

After you disable backups, no new backups are created, but existing backups are not removed.