Copying RDS Snapshot cross-region duration

Question

A customer wants to migrate their production RDS DBs from euw3 to euw1. The process is simple enought, just copy a created snapshot to another region.

We had to cancel the migration since both snapshots (20GB and 300GB) have been in the "Creating - 1%" state since 5:45 UTC this morning (more than 5 hours now). We couldn't halt their production workload any longer.

I've copied EC2 and RDS snapshots between regions several times in the past and never experienced this behavior. I know there are alternatives, I could always create a dump and restore that to a new RDS instance in euw1, but the snapshot copy approach is easier and I would like to make use of that.

**My question would be if there's any steps we can take to speedup the process**. I don't know what could be going on for a 20GB snapshot to take more than 5 hours to copy from one region to another.

Thanks!

Accepted Answer

20GB should not take 5 hours. Looks something is not right there.

As you said, there are multiple ways to do the migration with zero or near zero downtime using replication tools. And I would recommend the approaches using DMS or any other tool for production databases to minimize the downtime.

But I see that you prefer the snapshot copy approach. This is what you can try:

-- Enable the cross region automatic snapshot copy of the RDS Instance. This will replicate snapshots and transaction logs to a destination AWS Region of your choice.
-- During your outage window, you can just stop the current RDS, wait for the transaction logs to be restored on the other region. You can verify that by checking Latest restorable time and restore the RDS instance using that snapshot in the other region.

[+] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReplicateBackups.html#AutomatedBackups.Replicating.Enable

Above is the documentation on that. I recommend you to try it on some test environment before you plan this approach for your production instances.

Answer

Hi!

Finally what we did was to schedule the maintenance and snapshot copy overnight, strange enough both were full copied under 2 hours. First time they took little above 6 hours.

Thanks for your response, it has very good insight. Never thought of using DMS for this kind of job, in my head it was a tool just for on-premise migrations, but what you suggested is a very good approach, will keep that in mind for the future.

Thanks and best regards!

Copying RDS Snapshot cross-region duration

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