The provided backup and restoral playbooks does not have granular option of what it backups and what it restores.  It backs up everything, including the database and restores everything including the database.  Data is always lost up to the time of the full backup when a restoration is done. Most large companies like ours will have their database on external system that is configured for high availability and with multi-site replication.  It would be great a if the playbooks have the option to only backups and restores the platform elements.  This will allow for the restoral process to leave the database intact and prevent potential data loss.  Of course I'm simplifying the complexity of adding that functionality but the desired outcome is to have better support for external database and avoid data loss during AAP restoral.  

Current backup and restoral process for AAP have data loss up to the last time of a good backup.  This can potential cause loss of work perform on the AAP platform.  This also result in much larger backups as the DB is backed up during the backup process when its not necessary as our external database have it's own backup and recovery option.

I would like to backup everything with the option of backing up the database or without it.  The same would apply to the restoration.  I would like to restore everything while leaving the database intact which avoids potential data lose up the the last time of good backups.   As we have an external database setup that is highly available and have it own backups.  The backup and restoral process should support this recovery solution to avoid the need to backup the database again and the restoral process to avoid restoring the database each time even thought the database is healthy.  This allow for much faster recovery time as well.

This capability would be nice for all types of installation. We currently have AAP (containerized) installation and that is what we would like to have supported at the very least.

business justification:

• Current Challenges: What limitations or difficulties are you facing without this feature?
  The current backup and restore does a full backup and restore, including the database.  we have an external database that is highly available with database replications.  Since the backup and restore is full, it restores the database data as well, which is not the desired state when there is no issues with the database.  We end up loosing all data up to the last know good backup.

• Business Impact: How does the lack of this feature affect your workflows, performance, or productivity?
  Longer backup and restoral times because it's performing the task against a database that have its own high availability and backup solution already.  When doing a restoral, we end up loosing data up to the last backup point in time.

• Implementation Benefits: How would having this feature improve your operations or resolve the issues mentioned?
  This will reduce the impact of doing a restoral when the database was not affected. This will allow for no data lost for platform recovery and for using the restoral process for disaster recovery.