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Amazon EBS Snapshots

Simple, secure data protection for your block storage data

Get started with Amazon EBS Snapshots today

Amazon Elastic Block Store

Overview

Amazon EBS Snapshots provide a simple and secure data protection solution that is designed to protect your block storage data such as EBS volumes, boot volumes, as well as on-premises block data. EBS Snapshots are a point in time copy of your data, and can be used to enable disaster recovery, migrate data across regions and accounts, and improve backup compliance.

You can create and manage your EBS Snapshots through the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon Web Services CLI, or the Amazon Web Services SDKs. Amazon EBS Snapshots also integrate with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM), which allows you to define policies that help you automate snapshot lifecycle management. Amazon EBS Snapshots are stored incrementally, which means you are billed only for the changed blocks stored. Please visit the EBS pricing page for additional details.

Get started with Amazon EBS Snapshots today.

Benefits

Simple Snapshot Management

Amazon EBS Snapshots are a convenient way to backup your EBS volumes. The snapshots are automatically saved to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long-term retention. Amazon Web Services further simplifies the lifecycle management of your snapshots through integration with DLM, which allows you to create policies so that you can automate multiple tasks including creation, deletion, retention, and sharing of snapshots. This reduces the operational burden of snapshot management, and also helps reduce storage costs as DLM automatically deletes outdated backups based on your specified policies.

Cost-effective

Amazon EBS Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot, making them cost effective and ideal for frequent backups. You can use tools such as Amazon Web Services Cost Explorer to track snapshot usage and spend, and further optimize storage costs as needed. Additionally, with a pay-as-you-go cloud model, you no longer need to forecast and provision for the future, which significantly reduces your capital expenditure.

Secure

Amazon EBS offers a simple encryption solution for your EBS resources that does not require you to build, maintain, and secure your own key management infrastructure. You can easily configure your Amazon Web Services account to enforce encryption of any new EBS volumes and snapshots you create, including snapshots of your on-premises data. Additionally, you can prevent unauthorized access to your data by restricting public access to your EBS Snapshots. You can also configure locks on your EBS Snapshots to protect them from accidental or malicious deletions.

Highly available and durable

Amazon EBS Snapshots are a convenient way to backup your EBS volumes. The snapshots are automatically saved to Amazon S3 for long-term retention. S3 is designed for 99.99999999% (11 9’s) durability, ensuring higher availability of your EBS Snapshots.

How it works

Use cases

Disaster Recovery

Amazon EBS Snapshots allows you to improve disaster recovery workflows for your workloads running on-premises and on Amazon Web Services at low costs. You can directly create snapshots of your EBS volumes or your data on-premises, and then use these snapshots for recovery in the cloud. With the Fast Snapshot Restore feature, you can quickly restore data from these snapshots into EBS volumes and achieve low recovery time objectives.

Data Migration

With Amazon EBS Snapshots, you can easily move your data across regions, accounts, and Availability Zones. You can copy any snapshot accessible to you to another region or account, including snapshots created by you or shared with you. You can also copy snapshots that are used to create Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) available on Amazon Web Services Marketplace, which can then be use to launch new EC2 instances in other regions or accounts. Additionally, you can migrate your on-premises data to Amazon Web Services, by creating snapshots of that data and recovering them into EBS volumes.

Backup Compliance

With Amazon EBS Snapshots, you protect your valuable data by enforcing a regular backup schedule using DLM policies. You can set policies to retain backups as required by auditors to help improve internal compliance. Additionally, EBS Snapshots integrates with Amazon CloudTrail so that you can log, monitor, and retain account activity related to actions taken for your snapshots.