I am backing up my EFS using AWS Backup service. Wanted to know where the Backup is actually stored? Is this getting stored in the EFS itself or not? I noticed a huge hike in the data stored in the EFS so wanted to know if the automated backup can be causing this hike or not, I tried deleting few backup recovery points from the backup vault but is not making much of a difference.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Your backups are not stored on your EFS itself. They are stored in Recovery points in a backup vault. Term Recovery point is interchangeable with backup according to aws docs.
you need to check you application etc which stores data on efs or check efs itself what has been added which has caused this hike.
EFS Automatic backups and Regular EFS Backups are stored in different Backup Vaults.
The EFS Automatic backup vaults are stored in aws/efs/automatic-backup-vault vault.
By default you won't be able to delete the EFS Automatic Backup Recovery Points from aws/efs/automatic-backup-vault vault since the Access policy is set to deny deletions.
If you want to disable EFS Automatic Backups and delete those recovery points you can follow this document:
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/efs-disable-automatic-backups/
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I've two VMs created at the Compute Engine session with hourly snapshot as backup copies. I never created any storage bucket, I wonder where do those snapshots stored and how does it count for the storage space charges?
And, is there a way I can backup the VMs to on-prem storage? e.g. can I use any API command to download the VM snapshot to my local storage as a backup of backup just in case Google Cloud screwed up.
When you create a snapshot, you can specify a storage location. The location of a snapshot affects its availability and can incur networking costs when creating the snapshot or restoring it to a new disk. You will find the pricing for snapshot storage here.
This article describes how to create an image from your VM's root disk and export it to Google Cloud Storage or you can directly download it to your remote computer.
My java servlet web app is hosted in AWS EC2 instance. Is storing sensitive data (say db credentials) in my property (config) file of my java web app safe? When the EBS volumn is deallocated, will it contain the data I saved and used by someone else with in the same/different AWS account? Are there any security risks?
Data stored on the EBS volume is zeroed out after you delete the volume. This is carried out by AWS automatically.
Yes, the blocks on the EBS volume will be zeroed after you delete the volume.
From Amazon EBS volumes - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud:
The data persists on the volume until the volume is deleted explicitly. The physical block storage used by deleted EBS volumes is overwritten with zeroes before it is allocated to another account. If you are dealing with sensitive data, you should consider encrypting your data manually or storing the data on a volume protected by Amazon EBS encryption.
For more information on EBS encryption, see Amazon EBS encryption - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
I went with another approach considering the reason that anyone who has access to the file (via remote or someway) can read and pass it across. I used AWS systems manager (param store) to store the sensitive values as secure string. App retrieves it from param store and use it at run time. To reduce multiple hits, the value is cached for a configurable time. The original question is about the security of EBS and not about the alternate. However sharing my approach to let someone aware the alternate.
I ran a full initial snapshot of an EC2 instance I don't see a need for in the forseeable future. I plan to terminate the instance later today and turn off the domain DNS for the site pointing to it.
I'm aware AWS stores snapshots on S3, but Glacier is cheaper. So as an alternative, can I set a lifecycle policy on the snapshot so it automatically moves to Glacier after a period of time? If so, how exactly can I do this since the S3 console doesn't provide access to snapshot buckets? (The shorter the time-to-moving the better in my case -- I want the cheap, long-term storage)
Once moved, I'll want to delete the snapshot from S3. There will be no more incremental changes or snapshots; this is it.
Please be specific with CLI commands or steps if you don't mind -- I'm not terribly familiar with AWS yet.
There is no native way to do this. EBS snapshots are stored in S3, but that is a “behind the scenes” implementation detail. The snapshots are not visible in an S3 bucket, not are they exposed via the S3 API. So you cannot move them to Glacier.
A third party tool called N2WS that recently announced support for offloading snapshots to Glacier at AWS re:Invent 2018. However it stores the snapshots in its own format. It is running “on top of” AWS rather than doing it natively.
http://n2ws.com/
I have pretty uncommon task - backup all data and configurations from AWS account to local storage (and then potentially restore them).
OR at least EC2 snapshots and then restore them
Currently I am taking manual backup of our EC2 instance by zipping the data and downloading it locally as well as on DropBox.
But I am wondering, can I have an option where I just take a complete copy of the whole system automatically daily so if something goes wrong/crashes, I can replace it with previous copy immediately rather than spending hours installing and configuring things ?
I can see there is an option of take "Image" but can I automated them to have just 1 latest image and replace the system with single click ?
You can create a single Image of your instance as Backup of your instance Configuration.
And
To keep back up of your data you can use snapshots of your volumes.
snapshots store data in incremental format whenever you make any changes.
When ever needed you can just attach the volume from the snapshot to your Instance.
It is not a good idea to do "external backup" for EC2 instance snapshot, before you read AWS pricing details.
First, AWS is charging every GB of data your transfer OUTside AWS cloud. Check out this pricing. Generally speaking, after the 1st GB, the rest will be charge at least $0.09/GB, against S3-standard pricing ~ $0.023/GB.
Second, the snapshot created is actually charges as S3 pricing(Check :
Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot), not EBS pricing. After offset the transfer cost, perhaps you should consider create multiple snapshot than keep doing the data transfer out backup.
HOWEVER, if you happens to use an instance that use ephemeral storage, snapshot will not help. You need to copy the data out from ephemeral storage yourself. Then it is your choice to store under S3 or other place.
Third. If you worry the AWS region going down, check the multiple AZ option. Or checkout alternate AWS region option.
Fourth. When storing backup data in S3, you can always store them under Infrequent-Access, which save you some bucks, and you don't need to face an insane Glacier bills during emergency restore(Avoid Glacier, unless you are pretty sure about your own requirement).
Fifth, after done your plan of doing everything inside AWS, you can write bash script (AWS CLI) or use boto3, etc API to do the automatic backup.
Lastly , here is way of AWS create and maintain snapshot. Though each snapshot are deem "incremental", when u delete old snap shot :
the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain
only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the volume.
You can always "test" restore by create another EC2 instance that load the backup snapshot. Or you can mount the snapshot volume from another EC2 instance to check the contents.