When your Alibaba Cloud account has overdue payments, all pay-as-you-go ApsaraDB RDS instances under that account enter an overdue state and progress through suspension to release on a fixed timeline. Subscription (prepaid) instances are not affected.
Overdue payments can cause your RDS instances to be suspended and eventually released. The system sends you a notification when your account has overdue payments. Top up your account balance as soon as possible to prevent service interruption.
Instance status timeline
The following table shows how pay-as-you-go RDS instances change state after your account becomes overdue.
| Phase | Days overdue | Service status | What you can do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overdue — running | Day 1–15 | Instances run as normal. | Top up your account balance to restore normal billing status. |
| Suspended | Day 16–30 | Instances are stopped. Billing stops. | Top up your account balance. Instances resume immediately after the balance is restored. |
| Released | From day 31 | Instances are released and moved to the recycle bin. | Rebuild the instance from the recycle bin within the 8-day retention period. See Rebuild from recycle bin. |
| Permanently deleted | Day 9 after release (~day 39) | Backup files are deleted. Instances are removed from the recycle bin. | No recovery is possible after this point. |
While your account has overdue payments, you cannot manually release an RDS instance until you add enough funds to restore the balance.
Rebuild from recycle bin
After an instance is released on day 31, it stays in the recycle bin for 8 days. During this window, you can rebuild the instance to restore its data to a new RDS instance.
To rebuild a released instance, see the recycle bin documentation for your database engine:
Specific instance types are not moved to the recycle bin after release. Refer to the recycle bin documentation for your engine to confirm whether your instance qualifies.
Backup retention after release
By default, backup files are retained for 8 days after an instance is released. In two situations, backups are retained beyond 8 days based on the configured backup policy:
Cross-region backup is enabled and the cross-region backup retention period has not elapsed. See the cross-region backup documentation for MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
A backup retention policy after instance release was configured before the instance was released. See Configure backup retention policies for released instances.
When backups are retained under either of these extended policies, you cannot rebuild the instance from the recycle bin. Data is permanently deleted once the backup files are removed.
What's next
Instance status for overdue payments
You cannot manually release instances while your Alibaba Cloud account has an overdue payment.
Instance status | Operation |
From day 1 to day 15 after the payment becomes overdue, the instance runs normally. The instance status is Running. |
|
From day 16 to day 30 after the payment becomes overdue, the instance is suspended and billing stops. The instance is set to the Locked state. | |
On the 31st day after the payment becomes overdue, Alibaba Cloud releases the instance. After the instance is released, it is kept in the recycle bin for 8 days. Its backups are also retained for 8 days. | During the 8-day retention period after the instance is released, you can rebuild and recover the instance from the recycle bin. This restores the data from the original instance to a new instance. For more information, see , , , and , Recycle bin for MySQL instances, Recycle bin for SQL Server instances, Recycle bin for PostgreSQL instances, and Recycle bin for MariaDB instances. Important Some instances are not moved to the recycle bin. For more information, see the Recycle bin tutorials. |
On the 9th day after the instance is released, the instance is deleted from the recycle bin and its backups are no longer retained (with the following exceptions). Note After an instance is released, backups for instances that meet the following conditions are retained based on the configured backup policy:
| At this point, you cannot rebuild or recover the instance. After the instance backups are deleted, the data is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. |
