AWS Backup Local Timezones

At the end of August, AWS announced that AWS Backup would now support local timezones. Specifying a local timezone is a big win for anyone who has previously used AWS Backup or any service still using UTC. It makes choosing a start time easier (no more having to calculate offsets from UTC) and gets around the bugbear of dealing with daylight saving. UTC doesn't support daylight saving, so if you are in an area that does, your setting would be one hour out when daylight saving started. The offset was especially tricky if you wanted to start between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. AWS has rolled this out to all regions supporting AWS Backup, so it's time to update if you're using AWS Backup.

"How do you use local timezones within AWS Backup?" I'm glad you asked. If you are creating a new backup plan via the Console, it is a dropdown to select.

It is also easy to modify an existing backup plan via the Console. First, select the appropriate backup plan.

Second, select the backup rule and hit the "Edit" button.

Like the above diagram, select the dropdown from the?Backup window?section and choose the timezone you want. Remember also to update the start time. AWS will not do that for you.

If you use CloudFormation to create your resources, AWS has you covered there with the?ScheduleExpressionTimezone?setting.?

The CloudFormation documentation doesn't cover what the format is, though.

A bit of digging points to this page: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/APIReference/API_TimeZone.html

Which states: The name of the time zone, following the?IANA time zone standard. For example, America/Los_Angeles.

Simply put, if you aren't sure what the timezone entry should be, use the Console and take it from there (minus the UTC offset)

Legal Hold

As a bonus, I saw the AWS Backup entry for Legal Hold. AWS introduced the Legal Hold option at the end of November 2022. The announcement from AWS said, "Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold."?

Why is this important? If your company is involved in litigation and the information existed at the time, you need to be able to produce it. As Wikipedia says, "The legal hold is initiated by a notice or communication from legal counsel to an organization that suspends the normal disposition or processing of records, such as backup tape recycling, archived media and other storage and management of documents and information."?

So, if you use AWS Backup, you can now easily comply with Legal Hold requests. I won't go into details in this post, but you can get further information from the AWS documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/legalhold.html.

Wrap Up

I am thrilled with AWS Backup now having local time zones. It gives you a more consistent schedule where daylight saving will get calculated automatically. On top of that, you don't have to calculate offsets from UTC. A few other AWS services still use UTC; hopefully, AWS will update those soon.