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A tag is a label that you assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value that you define.

Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources based on purpose, owner, environment, and so on. Tags help you quickly identify groups of resources or even a specific resource. For example, you could place tags on Amazon EC2 instances to help you track the owner of each instance or which application or environment they belong to.

Tag rules can be added to policies to identify resources for backup. During each scheduled execution of the policy, all the current resources that match the tags in the policy rules are discovered. In other words, the correct set of resources applicable at the time of execution will be selected for backup.

While editing the policy rules, it is possible that the dashboard has not recently synced with AWS to show all the current resources. You may notice in this case that not all your resources appear to be correctly protected. In such a case, you can run the manual sync to get the latest resources and tags from AWS, and the dashboard will then reflect the correct state. However, backup for any newly tagged instances does not depend on the console sync, and resources selected based on the associated tags will still be protected irrespective of the sync state.