RDS now shows full snapshot size with the new FullSnapshotSizeInBytes field!

Hi, it's Shii-chan! Snapshot size has always been a bit hard to read, right? Now you can see it!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon RDS now displays the full snapshot size for RDS snapshots.

• API: a new FullSnapshotSizeInBytes field in DescribeDBSnapshots
• Console: a "Full Snapshot Size" column

The story so far

RDS snapshots are incremental. When you take multiple snapshots over time, each one stores only the new or modified blocks and keeps references to unchanged blocks from previous snapshots. So it was hard to tell how large one snapshot really was as a whole.

What changes

FullSnapshotSizeInBytes shows the total size of all blocks that make up a snapshot, including the blocks stored directly in that snapshot and all blocks referenced from previous snapshots. Because you can get it programmatically, tracking and managing capacity gets easier!

Dive Deep

Here is the example from the announcement: if you have a 100 GB database volume with 50 GB of data, the full snapshot size shows 50 GB whether it's the first snapshot or a later one.

This is different from the incremental snapshot size, which is only the size of newly changed blocks stored in that specific snapshot, so don't mix them up.

It is available for all Amazon RDS database instances in all commercial AWS Regions, through the console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.

Wrap-up

• FullSnapshotSizeInBytes is added to DescribeDBSnapshots
• A Full Snapshot Size column is added to the console
• Shows the whole snapshot size, including referenced blocks
• Separate from the incremental size

This is for database admins who want to understand snapshot capacity, and anyone writing automation scripts!