What is the recommended way to backup a MySQL/Amazon RDS database to S3?

The recommended way to back up RDS is with automatic backups and DB snapshots. DB snapshots are basically the same as EBS snapshots, which are stored in S3 behind the scenes, but are only available within the same region.

If you need cross-region fault tolerance (good plan!), there is no way to restore your data in another region without doing it "the hard way" from a mysqldump. Your alternatives are to back up using mysqldump (slow and terrible for any reasonable sized dataset), or set up your own EC2-based slave in another region and back that up using any available method (xtrabackup, EBS snapshots, etc). However, then you are back to managing your own MySQL instances, so you might as well abandon RDS entirely.

For my money, RDS provides absolutely no benefits in really any way and a whole lot of disadvantages in performance, flexibility, and reliability. I would ask yourself what value RDS provides to you.

I had the same issue. My solution was to write a simple bash script. It is limited to a single region however.

Here's the script in question:

#!/bin/bash
NOWDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
BACKUPNAME="$NOWDATE.sql.gz"

echo "Creating backup of database finances to $BACKUPNAME"
mysqldump –user=user –password=password database_name | gzip -9 > $BACKUPNAME

echo "Succesfully created database backup"

echo "Uploading backup to Amazon S3 bucket…"
s3cmd put $BACKUPNAME s3://path/to/file/$BACKUPNAME

echo "Successfully uploaded backup to S3"

echo "Deleting backup file…"
rm $BACKUPNAME

echo "Done"

AWS RDS now supports cross-region and cross-account copying of snapshots which will allow you to complete your goals simply using RDS.

You still have to use a dump script method to get backups to S3 at this point. The ability to use S3-IA or Glacier would be good in terms of cost savings as RDS backup costs are at S3 Standard or higher (vary by db).