RDS Excessive Backup Retention
Backup storage beyond the allocated database size is billed per gigabyte per month, for every day of retention configured.
Free to start. No card. The playground just needs your work email.
AWS
Found, explained, fixed.
Findings with a dollar figure attached, idle, oversized, orphaned, unscheduled and undiscounted spend.
Detect
ZopNight checks this automatically across AWS, with read-only access to the account.
Explain
Every finding says exactly what to change: Shorten backup retention on the RDS instance. Where the saving can be proven it is priced; where it cannot, the finding says so.
Fix
After a guided review, where you confirm the change, ZopNight applies a lifecycle policy, then checks the change took.
- Applies to
- RDS Instances on AWS
- The fix, by hand
- Open RDS → Databases → select this instance.
- Modify → Backup → Backup retention period.
- Set the retention (0 disables automated backups; never do this in production).
- Apply immediately or during the maintenance window.
- Audit the change in CloudTrail; older backups outside the new window are reaped on the next backup cycle.
ZopNight does this for you after a guided review.
- Category
- Rightsizing. Resources sized for headroom they never use. A smaller size runs the same workload for less.
- Where it appears
- The Savings tab of Recommendations, with every affected resource listed.
- Rule ID
RC-032- Full reference
Related checks
See the oversized resources in your account.
Connect a read-only role and the first pass runs on your own estate. This check, and the rest of the catalogue, with it.
Prefer to talk it through first? Book 20 minutes with the team.
- $30M+annualised cloud spend under management
- 550K+resources tracked since launch
- 20-60%off the bill in the first month
- SOC 2Type II report, plus ISO 27001
Figures published on zop.dev.