How to Automate EC2 Backups Across AWS Accounts with Organizations Backup Policies

Unlock powerful, enterprise-grade backup automation with AWS Organisations Backup Policies! In this hands-on tutorial, I show you exactly how to design, deploy, and test centralized backup policies that automatically protect resources across multiple AWS accounts — all without writing a single script.

Whether you're a cloud beginner, an AWS practitioner, or preparing for AWS certification, this walkthrough will help you understand how real multi-account environments manage backups at scale.

🚀 What You’ll Learn
✔ What AWS Organizations Backup Policies are
✔ Why enterprises use centralized backup governance
✔ How to enable AWS Backup as a trusted service
✔ How to create an organizational backup plan in the management account
✔ How to apply backup policies to an entire OU (Development OU in this demo)
✔ How tag-based backup selection works (Backup=true)
✔ How automatic backup plans appear in member accounts
✔ How backups are triggered for EC2 instances with the correct tags
✔ What IAM roles AWS Backup creates and how they work
✔ How to verify backup jobs, vaults, and recovery points

🖥 LIVE DEMO INCLUDED

In this video, I walk through:
Creating a management-account backup policy
Applying it to a Development Organizational Unit (OU)
Spinning up EC2 instances with tags
Watching the backup plan auto-propagate
Triggering and validating actual EC2 backups

This is the EXACT workflow used in real-world multi-account AWS environments.

🌟 Who Is This Video For?
AWS beginners and intermediate learners
Cloud engineers & architects
DevOps engineers working in multi-account setups
Anyone preparing for AWS Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, or SysOps

📌 Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
00:30 – Why Use AWS Organizations Backup Policies
03:30 – Configure AWS Backup Service in the AWS Development Account
04:56 – Configure IAM Role in the AWS Development Account
06:15 – Launch an EC2 Instance to be backed up
10:00 – Enable Backup Policies in the AWS Organizations in Management Account
11:20 – Review the Backup Policy in Visual Studio Code
13:02 – Create a Backup Policy in the Management Account
14:41 – Test the Backup Policy Run in the AWS Development Account

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