In order to proceed you're going to need the following:
- The identifier for the RDS instance you wish to back up
- A unique identifier that you'd like to assign to this snapshot
The snapshot identifier has some constraints:
- It needs to start with a letter
- It must not be longer than 255 characters
If your primary database isn't running in a multi-AZ configuration then be aware that creating a snapshot will cause an outage. In a multi-AZ configuration the snapshot is taken on the standby instance so no outage occurs.
