Exporting an RDS Snapshot to S3

If for whatever reason you need to restore a snapshot of an RDS database, there are a few possible pitfalls and things to be aware of.

IAM Role requirements

The IAM role to perform the export needs a bunch of permissions:

• s3:GetBucketLocation, and various other s3 permissions (unless you have a specific use case, you might want to give the role a full access policy for S3).
  
  
• The principal in the role's trust relationship needs to include the "export.rds.amazonaws.com" Service principal, or else the RDS exporter won't be able to assume the IAM role you tell it to assume.