Working with Backups
A backup, or recovery point, represents the content of a resource, such as an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume or Amazon DynamoDB table, at a specified time. Recovery point is a term that refers generally to the different backups in AWS services, such as Amazon EBS snapshots and DynamoDB backups. The terms recovery point and backup are used interchangeably.
In AWS Backup, recovery points are saved in backup vaults, which you can organize according to your business needs. For example, you can save a set of resources that contain financial information for fiscal year 2016. When you need to recover a resource, you can use either the AWS Backup console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to find and recover the resource you need.
Each recovery point has a unique ID. The following table contains the AWS resource types that AWS Backup supports and examples of their corresponding recovery point ID.
| Resource Type | Backup Name | Recovery Point ID Example |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance | Amazon EC2 backup | image/ami-0ecdf967356c809c7 |
| Amazon EBS volume | Amazon EBS snapshot | snapshot/snap-05f426fd8kdjb4224 |
| Amazon RDS database | Amazon RDS snapshot | awsbackup:job-be59cf2a-2343-4402-bd8b-226993d23453 |
| Amazon Aurora DB cluster | Aurora clusters | awsbackup:job-be59cf2a-2343-4402-bd8b-226993d23453 |
| Amazon EFS file system | Amazon EFS backup | d99699e7-e183-477e-bfcd-ccb1c6e5455e |
| DynamoDB table | DynamoDB backup | table/MyDynamoDBTable/backup/01547087347000-c8b6kdk3 |
| AWS Storage Gateway volume | Amazon EBS snapshot* | snapshot/snap-0d40e49137e31d9e0 |
*When you back up an AWS Storage Gateway volume, an Amazon EBS snapshot is created. This snapshot can then be restored either as an Amazon EBS volume or as an AWS Storage Gateway volume.
The following sections provide an overview of the basic backup management tasks in AWS Backup.
