Posted On: Oct 24, 2022

On September 12th 2022, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) introduced EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots that can help you save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access. Today, we are announcing that you can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically move snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager to EBS Snapshots Archive, further reducing the need to manage complex custom scripts and the risk of having unattended storage costs. The feature is available in both Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

EBS Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot and making them cost effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently. You might also have snapshots that you access every few months or years and do not need fast access to data, such as snapshots that need to be retained long-term for regulatory reasons.

Rather than creating and managing your own custom scripts to move snapshots from standard to the archive tier, you can now create Data Lifecycle Manager policies to do this at no additional cost. You can setup the policies to create and keep snapshots in the standard tier in case they need to be quickly restored into volumes. After a period of time that you specify, any policies with Snapshot Archive enabled will automatically move the snapshots to the archive tier. Finally, Data Lifecycle Manager will automatically delete the snapshots at the end of its retention.

To learn more about automating EBS Snapshots Archive with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, and to evaluate whether it is suitable for your use case, please refer to the associated technical documentation. This feature is available through the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI), Amazon SDKs, or the Amazon Web Services Console in both Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.