Databases

Design a backup and recovery strategy for a production RDS database, including what point-in-time recovery can and can't actually do for you.

Automated backups and point-in-time recovery cover the everyday case, restoring to any second within the retention window, but every restore creates a brand-new instance rather than repairing the existing one, and neither protects against a whole-region outage on its own. Cross-region snapshot copies and manual snapshots fill the two gaps that leaves.