Old manual RDS snapshots
Automated snapshots expire on their own through the backup window. Manual ones never expire — they bill until somebody deletes them.
What this problem is
RDS has two kinds of snapshot and they behave in opposite ways. The automated one follows the retention window configured on the database and is removed by itself once that passes. The manual one, created by a person or a script, has no deadline: it exists until explicitly deleted, and outlives even the database that produced it.
A manual snapshot nearly always comes from a moment of caution — before a schema migration, before a risky deploy, before tearing down an environment. The moment passes, the migration works, and the snapshot stays. Because it no longer appears next to the database in the console once the database is gone, it is the kind of item you only discover by reading the invoice carefully.
Storage is billed on the snapshot's data size. For a mid-sized database that is not trivial, and a handful of manual snapshots from different years can total more than the production database itself would cost for a month.
How we detect it
We list the account's manual snapshots with DescribeDBSnapshots, which reports each one's type, creation date, source database and allocated size. The comparison is between a snapshot's age and the retention window that makes sense for you.
- Old manual RDS snapshots
What it costs
Database snapshot storage runs about $0.095 per GB-month beyond what automated backup already includes (us-east-1). Seven 100 GB snapshots come to roughly $66 a month.
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
Does your account have this?
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