Changing your retention period

You must use your backup plan to increase or decrease the retention period for your existing continuous backup rule. The minimum retention period is 1 day. The maximum retention period is 35 days. The change in retention period will take effect when the next backup is completed following this change. You cannot use the UpdateRecoveryPointLifecycle API or CLI to update the retention period of any continuous backup.

Retention period by service

The retention behavior can be specific to the resource type that is backed up in the recovery point.

Amazon S3

When a retention period of an Amazon S3 continuous recovery point has changed (increased or decreased), that recovery point status will become STOPPED. A new continuous recovery point with the altered retention settings will be created.

Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS

For recovery points of Aurora and Amazon RDS resources, only one recovery point is possible at a time. No new recovery points are created when a retention period is changed; instead, AWS Backup updates the existing recovery point with the retention specifications within the backup plan.

SAP HANA on Amazon EC2

For recovery points of SAP HANA on EC2 resources, only one recovery point is possible at a time. No new recovery points are created when a retention period is changed; instead, AWS Backup updates the existing recovery point with the retention specifications within the backup plan.

Ensure that you set the retention period for these backups to be greater than the backup frequency to avoid a scenario where the recovery point transitions to EXPIRED state.