Often it is necessary to convert an unencrypted RDS instance into an encrypted one. And it is usually expected that this process is done with minimum or no downtime. Unfortunately, one can only enable encryption when the instance is created. However, there is still hope, as there are a couple of workarounds to encrypt your existing data.
In this article, I will discuss two different solutions to achieve this result.
Solution 1: Create a snapshot and copy the snapshot to a new encrypted snapshot:
- Create a manual snapshot of the unencrypted RDS instance
- Go to Snapshots from the left panel and choose the snapshot just created
- From the Actions, choose Copy snapshot option and enable encryption
- Select the new encrypted snapshot
- Go to Actions and …