Amazon RDS for MySQL creates and saves automated backups of your DB instance during the backup window. A storage volume snapshot of your entire DB instance (and not just individual databases) is created. Amazon RDS then saves the automated backups of your DB instance according to the backup retention period that you specify. During the backup retention period, you can recover your database to any point in time.

However, if your DB instance doesn't have automated backups enabled, you can enable this setting at any time. To enable automated backups, set the backup retention period to a positive nonzero value. When automated backups are enabled, your RDS instance and database is taken offline and a backup is immediately created. The outage occurs when you change the backup retention period from "0" to a nonzero value, or from a nonzero value to "0". This behavior applies to both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ DB instances.

You can also use a cron job to schedule a backup of your Amazon RDS for MySQL instance using either the mysqldump or mysqlbinlog utility. Or, you can perform a manual backup using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The manual snapshots aren't subject to the backup retention period and will not expire.

Note: If you receive errors when running an AWS CLI command, make sure that you’re using the most recent version of the AWS CLI.