How to disable deletion protection?

I was about to ask whether the "Enable deletion protection" checkbox had disappeared from front-end recently... then I realised I was looking at the Modify page for the db instance itself, rather than the cluster. Whilst both cluster and db have a Modify page, it's at cluster level that you have to disable delprot.

Edited by: olisteadman on Oct 16, 2019 1:45 AM

I believe you need to modify the cluster, not the instance, to disable deletion protection.

I just had to figure this out myself, as it's the first time I've needed to do it. The database has to be running.

From RDS > Databases

1. Click on the DB Name hyperlink of the database you want to modify.
2. Click the "Modify" button in the upper right.
3. Uncheck the "Enable deletion protection" checkbox at the very bottom of the page and click the "Continue" button.
4. Choose the appropriate scheduling option and click the "Modify DB Instance" button.

Hope this helps!

Thank you so much for this. I couldn't find the Deletion Protection checkbox either and finally realized that I was looking for it on the Modify screens of Neptune databases and not clusters.

Meanwhile, AWS was charging me and charging me for those databases!

The way to think of "Deletion Protection" is, it keeps your data from disappearing. The number of instances in an Aurora cluster can increase or decrease - even go down to zero instances - and the data is still safe. It's only when "Delete Cluster" is performed that the data goes away. And that's why Deletion Protection is a property of the cluster, not instance-by-instance.

By the way, if there's trouble deleting, downsizing, etc. an Aurora cluster that's no longer needed - you can do "Stop Cluster" which will stop all the instance charges, while you figure out the solution. (The cluster gets restarted automatically after 7 days.)