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what's a good way to backup a Postgres DB (running on Amazon RDS). The built in snapshoting from RDS is by default daily and you can not export the snapshots. Besides that, it can take quite a long time to import a snapshot.

Is there a good service that takes dumps on a regular basis and stores them on e.g. S3? We don't want to spin up and maintain a ec2 instance which does that.

Thank you!

Sebastian Slomski
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    Possible duplicate of [RDS to S3 using pg\_dump directly (without intermediary)](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22017596/rds-to-s3-using-pg-dump-directly-without-intermediary) – Sunit Dec 09 '15 at 10:22
  • I want the backups to be automated, so I would prefer to have dedicated service for that. – Sebastian Slomski Dec 09 '15 at 14:20
  • This is how some people are doing: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9815612/should-i-stick-only-to-aws-rds-automated-backup-or-db-snapshots – phoenix Dec 09 '15 at 14:46

2 Answers2

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I want the backups to be automated, so I would prefer to have dedicated service for that.

Your choices:

  • run pg_dump from an EC2 instance on a schedule. This is a great use case for Spot instances.
  • restore a snapshot to a new RDS instance, then run pg_dump as above. This reduces database load.

Want to run a RDS snapshot more often than daily? Kick it off manually.

These are all automateable. For "free" (low effort on your part) you get daily snapshots. I agree, I wish they could be sent to S3.

tedder42
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SOLUTION: Now you can do a pg_dumpall and dump all Postgres databases on a single AWS RDS Instance.

It has caveats and so its better to read the post before going ahead and compiling your own version of pg_dumpall for this. Details here.

Robins Tharakan
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