In this course, you will learn how to use AWS Backup to create snapshots and have them available in another region — essentially creating a Disaster Recovery site.
Learning Objectives
- Have a greater understanding of the AWS Backup service and how it interacts with other services such as EC2, EBS, and RDS
- See how we create a cross-region backup
- Terminology of AWS Backup
- Basic usage
- Creating a Backup Plan
- Enabling and verifying cross-region functionality
Intended Audience
- Those who want to understand the basics of the AWS Backup service
- Those ready to tackle the hands-on task of creating EC2 snapshots that could be used to recover from an outage
- Those who manage a fleet of EC2, perhaps along with RDS for their databases
Prerequisites
- Have an understanding of the basics of AWS, such as using EC2 for Virtual Machines and RDS for your databases. As long as you understand how those services work at a high level, you should be able to get the most out of this course.
There's another critical usage of AWS Backup that I haven't touched, but let's talk about that right now. If we go to jobs here, this is where you get the reported activity of AWS backups. As you can see, I have a job here that completed, which was a backup of my web server. Now, you see three tabs here. One is backup jobs, then restore jobs, and then, copy jobs. Tkind of self-explanatory, let me explain. Backups is going to be the activity of your backup plans or on-demand jobs about certain backups. Of course, the same is true for restore and in this case, it's coming from the backup vault and back into your resources that you are trying to restore. Now, what does copy means?
Copy is essentially a third and critical usage of AWS Backup, which allows for cross-region disaster recovery. Let me show you how that works. We'll go to our backup plan and select it. And if you remember, we have our backup rule right here. I'm going to click on it and then, click the 'Edit' button. And in here at the bottom, you have an option that says, "copy to destination." What this does is it gives you the ability to create a copy that is geographically far away from your data.
This is great because if you have a disaster in AWS, like a data center outage or some natural disaster or something like that, you can have your data automatically copied to a different region. Let's say Canada Central 1, for example. With this copy, you can do, you know, I want to use the default, as I mentioned, most of the time, you'll be using the default. You can do that there. You can add additional copies. So, I want a copy in Canada, but I also want an additional copy in Europe, in case, you know, there's a disaster that occurs in the American continent or some huge Internet outage, your data can still be restored from a third copy in another continent, for example.
Not only that, but you can activate this option, which allows you to, of course with proper permissions, you can access another backup vault in a different AWS account that you control. As long as it's something that you have access to through IAM, proper permissions, of course, you'll be able to do your backup there. So, again, this is the, probably the third and most useful feature of this tool other than the obvious backup and restore as you having the ability to do cross-region copies that you can always restore in the event of a disaster.

Software Development has been my craft for over 2 decades. In recent years, I was introduced to the world of "Infrastructure as Code" and Cloud Computing.
I loved it! -- it re-sparked my interest in staying on the cutting edge of technology.
Colleagues regard me as a mentor and leader in my areas of expertise and also as the person to call when production servers crash and we need the App back online quickly.
My primary skills are:
★ Software Development ( Java, PHP, Python and others )
★ Cloud Computing Design and Implementation
★ DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Integration