EC2 Instance Storage : EBS Snapshot

So now let’s talk about EBS snapshots. So you can take your EBS volumes snapshot, which is also called a backup.

We will be able to restore EBS volumes from that backup. Now to make a backup, it is not necessary to detach the volume prior to doing the backup, but it is recommended just to make sure that everything is clean on your EBS volume.

We can also copy snapshots across availability zones or regions, and the idea is that you would be able to transfer some of your data in a different region on AWS to leverage the global infrastructure.

So if we look at US-EAST-1A, and we want to transfer an EBS volume to US-EAST-1B, the way we do it is that we would have the EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance, and then we would snapshot it. So maybe we would stop the EC2 instance ahead of time to make sure the snapshot is clean or we could just do it on the fly.

Now the EBS snapshots exist in your region. And that EBS snapshot can be used to restore a new EBS volume in another availability zone. And then now that this is done, we can attach the new EBS volume to an EC2 instance in US-EAST-1B.

There are some features need to know about for EBS Snapshots:

The first one, an EBS snapshot archive. It allows you to move your snapshots to another storage tier called an archive tier, and that tier is 75% cheaper. It takes between 24 to 72 hours to restore from the archive. So these are for snapshot that are not very important to you to restore it in a rush.

The second one, Recycle bin for EBS snapshots. So by default, when you delete snapshots, they’re gone. But you can set up a recycle bin, and the recycle bin will have all the snapshots that are deleted. And then after a while, maybe you can specify from one day to one year, the snapshots are gone from the bin.

I hope you liked the blog. Happy Learning !!