Backup and recovery FAQ

What backup schedule should I select?

Define a backup schedule frequency that aligns to your recovery point objective (RPO). Define a backup time when your workload is under the least amount of load and when user impact can be reduced. Create a point-in-time snapshot whenever you are going to make a significant change to your workload.

Do I need to create backups in my development accounts?

Test potentially breaking changes in your development accounts for your workloads and create backups before performing breaking changes. You might have many more point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups in your development and non-production accounts from development and testing activities.

Can I upgrade applications and continue to use an EBS volume while a snapshot is being created without any impact?

Snapshots occur asynchronously; the point-in-time snapshot is created immediately, but the status of the snapshot is pending until all the modified blocks have been transferred to Amazon S3. For large initial snapshots or subsequent snapshots where many blocks have changed, the transfer can take several hours. While it is transferring, an in-progress snapshot is not affected by ongoing reads and writes to the volume. For more information, see the AWS documentation.