how to delete items hitting TotalBackupBilled metric for RDS

Question

Recently AWS started charging for RDS backups/snapshots and I was trying to identify how to remove items that were impacting our daily bill. I tried to follow the instructions sent from AWS by email (attached below) but I wasn't able to find the specific snapshots or backups that are causing us to be billed.

The names listed in the TotalBackupBilled metric don't seem to match any found in my snapshots from RDS or any other backup details I can find.

I suspect these snapshots/backups are remnants of previously deleted clusters that were saved at the time of deletion but I'm not sure how to get access to those from S3/other mechanism.

Hello,

You are receiving this message because you have Amazon Aurora database instance(s) with active backups or snapshots.

This message is to notify you of a possible change in your monthly Aurora bill. As stated on our website 1, Aurora charges for backup storage that exceeds the free allocation of 100% of the size of your Aurora database. To date, you haven't been billed for any backup storage. Starting March 1, 2020, we will begin billing for backup storage in excess of the free allocation. There will not be any back-dated or retroactive charges for your use of Aurora backups before March 1, 2020.

The backup storage costs are dependent on your backup retention policy and current snapshots for your Aurora instance(s), which you can review and adjust on the RDS Management Console. Please refer to our documentation for detailed instructions:

• Overview of Backing Up and Restoring an Aurora DB Cluster [2]
• Working With Backups [3]
• Deleting a Snapshot [4]
• Understanding Aurora Backup Storage usage [5]

On November 11, 2019, we started populating the following CloudWatch metrics that help you estimate costs and keep track of your use of backup storage:

SnapshotStorageUsed: Represents the amount of backup storage used, in gibibytes (GiB), for storing manual snapshots beyond the backup retention period. Manual snapshots taken within the retention period don't count against your backup storage. Automatic snapshots also don't count against your backup storage.

BackupRetentionPeriodStorageUsed: This metric represents the amount of backup storage used, in gibibytes (GiB), for storing continuous backups at the current time. This value depends on the size of the cluster volume and the amount of changes you make during the retention period.

TotalBackupStorageBilled: Represents the sum, in gibibytes (GiB), of BackupRetentionPeriodStorageUsed and SnapshotStorageUsed, minus the amount of free backup storage which equals the size of the cluster volume for one day.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please contact us via the AWS Support Center [6].

1 https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/pricing [2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html#Aurora.Managing.Backups.Backup [3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_WorkingWithAutomatedBackups.html#USER_WorkingWithAutomatedBackups.BackupRetention [4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_DeleteSnapshot.html [5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-storage-backup.html

Sincerely, Amazon Web Services

An example of the db snapshots/backups that I no longer require are seen in 2 and 3 in this screen shot: TotalBackupBilled metric view from today

Followup; still can't find all of the snapshots but I was able to find most of them by name using CLI (the largest one is still not shown in the below commands):

aws rds describe-db-cluster-snapshots

aws rds describe-db-snapshots

Answer 1

Althought I still can't find all of the snapshots shown in the metric I was able to find most of them by name using CLI (the largest one is still not shown in the below commands):

aws rds describe-db-cluster-snapshots

aws rds describe-db-snapshots

and the following was used to delete one of the cluster-snapshots I no longer required:

aws rds delete-db-cluster-snapshot --db-cluster-snapshot-identifier "restore-2019-05-01-05-38-final-snapshot"