Amazon RDS mysqldump outside of the Amazon eco-system

Question

I would like to do a daily mysqldump to my own local disk out side of the amazon eco-system. I have few reasons I want to do this daily.

1. I want to be in more control of my database when RDS\EBS goes down again.
2. RDS only allows you to restore within the same availability zone. This really gets me because a natural disaster or network fault at the availability zone pretty much renders backups useless because you can only restore to the same zone. :/
3. Would like a sandbox/test database where I don't have to pay for space and bandwith.

My big question is if I do a daily mysql dump of a 50gb database will my bandwidth\IO costs skyrocket? I'm assuming they will! Has anyone done something like this before?

UPDATE:

• I am running a Multi-AZ production environment be recent outages still proved that there is no such thing as complete failover.
• Our company has two services, a front facing web site and internal processing. It's most important that our internal operations don't stop. Our web site could go dark for several hours if need be. Having a recent mysql dump at my figure tips seem priceless to me.

Answer 1

So you have a few points of concern that you note.

With regard to being in control of your database, I am not really sure what you are getting to here. If your production DB goes down, you don't have control over it. Even if you have a local backup of it, that isn't going to do you much good if you don't have a place to host that data.

Is your current production RDS instance a multi-AZ instance to help shield against AZ outtage? If it is, the fail over would happen automatically for you.

RDS snapshots are available to restore in different availability zones. See the documentation for rds-restore-db-instance command line at this link http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonRDS/latest/CommandLineReference/CLIReference-cmd-RestoreDBInstanceFromDBSnapshot.html

Note that you can specify which AZ you want to restore to.

Based on a daily backup of 50GB, you would be talking about spending $180 in data transfers for backups alone. It would be MUCH cheaper to simply have a small test RDS in the same region as your production RDS instance for testing (I think it is like $5/month for a micro). All your data transfer between these boxes (i.e. moving snapshots onto it) would be free.

You can do the math on pricing yourself here: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/#pricing

This is not to mention that doing your daily backups against production would interrupt your production DB access for the time it locks the DB to perform the dump. This is of course unless you pay to have an RDS read replica that you can take the dumps from.

Finally, there are subtle differences between RDS and a standalone MySQL server in regards to how they are configured, I would much rather have my testing environment be as similar to my production environment as possible.