Creating and restoring snapshots

The RDS service supports creating database snapshots (sometimes also called database backups), which are point-in-time copies of a complete volume where the database resides. The snapshots are created incrementally, meaning that only the blocks of the volume that have changed since the last snapshot are saved to the next snapshot. This essentially means that the same characteristics apply to RDS snapshots as EC2 snapshots, with one exception: when creating an RDS snapshot, the instance I/O will be frozen due to the fact that the RDS snapshots need to be consistent and can be used as ACID-compliant backups of your database. This will mean that, when using a single instance, the instance will become unavailable for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes while the snapshot is being taken, depending on the size of the data in the snapshot being...