title: Why does an RDS instance take > 2 hours to start?
body: <p>New to AWS and RDS. Created a test <code>db.t3.micro</code> DB instance, used it for a few hours, then stopped it.</p>
  
  <p>Today I started it, and over 2 hours later it's still showing "Starting...". Is this normal?</p>
  
  <p>There is one database with one table with one row on that instance. The only thing I can see in the logs is: <em>"Recovery of the DB instance has started. Recovery time will vary with the amount of data to be recovered."</em> (from roughly the time I gave the <em>Start</em> command via AWS console).</p>
  
  <h3>Update: the server finally started in 3 hrs 37 mins</h3>