Should I stick only to AWS RDS Automated Backup or DB Snapshots?

Question

I am using AWS RDS for MySQL. When it comes to backup, I understand that Amazon provides two types of backup - automated backup and database (DB) snapshot. The difference is

Answer 1

Just from personal experience, yesterday I accidentally deleted a table and had to restore from an RDS snapshot. The latest snapshot was only 10 minutes old, which was perfect. However, Amazon RDS took about 3 hours to get the snapshot online, during which time, the affected section of our site was completely offline.

So if you need to make a very quick recovery, do NOT depend on RDS backups.

Keep in mind, you can't download your snapshot so that you could view a database dump. Your only option is to wait for it to load in to a new database instance. So if you're only looking to restore a single table, RDS backups can make it a very painful process.

No blame to Amazon on this- they are awesome. But just something to keep in mind when planning, because it was a learning experience for us.