A Beginner’s Guide to RDS Backup and Restore on AWS

This article provides a beginner-friendly guide to Amazon RDS, focusing on high availability and disaster recovery. It explains that Amazon RDS is a managed service for relational databases. The guide details how to create an RDS instance, choosing PostgreSQL or MySQL on a single availability zone with a micro instance class and basic storage. It then outlines connecting to the instance and inserting sample data. The process of taking a manual snapshot for backup purposes is demonstrated through both the AWS console and the command-line interface. To simulate data loss, a sample record is deleted from a table. Subsequently, the article explains how to restore the database from the previously taken snapshot, creating a new RDS instance. Verification confirms that the deleted data is present in the restored database. Key learnings include that Multi-AZ is for high availability, restored databases have new endpoints, and point-in-time restores create new instances. The conclusion emphasizes the critical role of backups for disaster recovery and suggests further practice with point-in-time recovery.