Automate snapshot copy across region

Question

Hi all  
  
I am currently running a POC in my AWS estate of DocDb, one of the areas I am working on is backups. I currently have backups enabled and snapshots are being taken (10GB in size). What I want to do is automate copying these snapshots to another region for safe keeping.  
  
I know I can do this via the GUI, but it must be automated; so I checked Boto3 and can see that Python could be used to achieve this, however, the documentation states snapshot copying can take hours - ruling out Lambda???  
  
Is there any best practice tips on how I can achieve automated copying of these snapshots that anyone recommends? I don't want any manual work, it must be fully automated.  
  
Thanks

Answer

Snapshot Copy can take time irrespective of the method you use to copy it since the process is same in the background. Depending on the Amazon Regions involved and the amount of data to be copied, a cross-Region snapshot copy can take hours to complete.

In some cases, there might be a large number of cross-Region snapshot copy requests from a given source Amazon Region. In such cases, Amazon RDS might put new cross-Region copy requests from that source Amazon Region into a queue until some in-progress copies complete. No progress information is displayed about copy requests while they are in the queue. Progress information is displayed when the copying starts.

AWS Backup can perform cross-account backup for Amazon RDS encrypted with AWS KMS-CMK (Customer managed keys) because the AWS KMS-CMK can be shared across accounts. However, for Amazon RDS encrypted with KMS AWS managed key such as the default encryption key for RDS (aws/rds), the backups cannot be copied across accounts as the default encryption key for RDS cannot be shared across accounts. Review the blog post ["Create and share encrypted backups across accounts and Regions using AWS Backup"](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/create-and-share-encrypted-backups-across-accounts-and-regions-using-aws-backup/) to learn more.

Automate snapshot copy across region

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