RDS PostgreSQL snapshot and restore to a different account

Question

A customer is setting up RDS PostgreSQL in one account (8 TB stored in total), and would like to take daily snapshots for restoring to another account's RDS PostgreSQL for their development environment. Both accounts are part of the same AWS Organization.

Let's assume the snapshot is incremental, but I guess the restore would need to be for all the 8 TB each day.

1. Is RDS Snapshot Export an option for this case?, or in other words does it supports restoring to a different account?

2. What would be the costs involved daily in the backup and restore process (either manually or via snapshot export)? Does the restore have an associated cost? Should we consider Data Transfer Out in this scenario?

Thank you

orlyandico · Accepted Answer

Snapshots can be shared with another account. There is no need to copy the snapshots so long as it’s within a region. This can be done via the CLI:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/rds/modify-db-snapshot-attribute.html

Whether the snapshot is incremental or full is immaterial to the sharing, so long as it’s within the same region. You can’t instantiate an RDS instance from a snapshot in another region, so the target account would need to copy the snapshot cross region if that were required; this would attract data transfer costs.

The caveat is that you cannot share encrypted snapshots cross-account unless the snapshot (and implicitly the source database) used a customer-managed KMS key, and not the system-managed RDS KMS key. The customer-managed key would also need to be shared with the target account.

RDS PostgreSQL snapshot and restore to a different account

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