The amazon AWS RDS Service is amazing and creates really good backups in most cases. The only problem I've ran into is that sometimes you want more backups than what AWS allows or you want to do them a different intervals and keep them offsite. Typically AWS RDS Backups are stored on a S3 but you can't get to them. This simple script dumps the data out of the RDS straight to Amazon AWS S3 using the s3cmd and the native mysqldump that comes with ubuntu. Steps to install and configure are listed below.

This install assumes you are on an amazon ec2 instance running ubuntu 15.04. If this is not the case you may use this as a guide to install via your favorite flavor of Linux.

• $ sudo apt-get install -y s3cmd
• $ sudo apt-get install -y mysql-client-5.6

First get your EC2 to connect by default to the RDS. This can be done with a simple file placed at ~/.my.cnf. A sample of this file is located in the samples folder in this git repo. After this is done configure your s3cmd using s3cmd --configure. You will need your IAM info for s3 at this point.

Last edit the rdstos3backup.sh script and edit the top few lines to suite your needs. For example you might not want --rr because you may want more redundancy than I did. Fix to suite your needs and then save the file in /usr/local/bin/.

Optionally you might want to put this script in a crontab to run every night. You can achieve this by using the folllowing crontab:

*    3    *    *    *   /usr/local/bin/rdstos3backup.sh 1>/dev/null >&2