I have careated backup for my EBS volumes .
Now I have 5 snapshot in EBS . for more safety I want to move snapshots to s3 bucket.
How to move move snapshots from EBS to S3 bucket. ?
From the documentation about EBS snapshots, you'll notice:
You can back up the data on your EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking
point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which
means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your
most recent snapshot are saved.
[...]
If you access a piece of data that hasn't been loaded yet, the volume
immediately downloads the requested data from Amazon S3, and then
continues loading the rest of the volume's data in the background.
So, the snapshots are automatically stored in S3, but you can't access them as a storage bucket key.
Related
We are creating an EBS Snapshot from a volume of 5 TB attached to an EC2 instance in an AWS region (us-east-1). This is the initial snapshot (first snapshot) created from the EBS volume. The volume itself is also created from from a series of incremental snapshots (created earlier) in the same region.
When i create the EBS snapshot in the same region, it takes less than 5 minutes for the snapshot to be created (initial snapshot). I understand that this snapshot is initial, as it is the first snapshot being created from the volume.
My question is, this snapshot being the initial one (first one to be created from the restored EBS Volume), will it copy a new set of data (5 TB) internally to S3 (as Snapshots are stored in S3 behind the scenes) ? .
OR because the EBS volume was also restored from some incremental snapshot, when I create first snapshot from this restored volume (in the same region), will it internally just store pointer to the S3 location for the files, as those files are already somewhere in S3 (because the volume was restored from an incremental snapshot) ?
The intent is to understand the reason behind the fact that when I create a full (initial) snapshot from the EBS volume in the same region (us-east-1), it takes less than few minutes, (similar behavior to incremental snapshot), but the moment I attempt to copy the EBS snapshot to another AWS Region, it takes hours (in excess of 12 hours) to complete the EBS snapshot copy operation to other AWS Region (us-west-2) in the absence of any previous snapshots being copied to the remote AWS region earlier, from the same volume
Creating Snapshots in the same region is incremental so if you have existing snapshot aws will only backup the incremental changes, however, when you copy the snapshot to another region, it has no history of the snapshot so it will be considered as brand new snapshot.
Are EBS snapshots versioned?
If Yes, where can I find the version information.
I tried to check in Amazon official docs,but couldn't get a clear answer to this.
Yes and No.
Each snapshot is, in a way, a 'version'.
The reason for this is that, when a Snapshot is created, any block that has been added or modified since the previous snapshot is copied to Amazon S3 (in a place you can't directly access) and the Snapshot becomes the 'index' to those blocks.
Scenario:
Create Snapshot1
Modify one block
Create Snapshot2
When Snapshot2 was created, one block was copied to S3. Snapshot2 still points to all the blocks used in the volume, but they were already in S3 and didn't need to be re-copied. So, you can think of Snapshot1 and Snapshot2 as being different 'versions' of the disk.
If Snapshot1 is deleted, the underlying data is kept in S3 because it is used by Snapshot2. If Snapshot2 is then deleted, all of the snapshot data in S3 will be deleted. (Unless the original volume was based on an AMI, which is a snapshot itself! In that case, only the changes made since the AMI was instantiated are deleted. Neat and confusing, eh!)
AWS EBS Snaphots do not expose a version. They are identified by Snapshot ID, Date (Started) and Volume ID.
Here is an AWS article on snapshots:
EBS Snapshots
Here is third party article on snapshots:
AWS EBS Snapshot Explained
I'm starting with AWS and I've been taking my first steps on EC2 and EBS. I've learnt about EBS snapshots but I still don't understand if the backups, once you've created a snapshot, are managed automatically by AWS or I need to do them on my own.
AWS just introduced a new feature called Lifecycle Manager (in the EC2 Dashboard, at the bottom left) that allows you to create automated backups for your volumes. Once you configure a policy, AWS will handle the backup process for your volumes.
This is only a couple of weeks old so just wanted to mention here.
Snapshots are managed by AWS
snapshot of an EBS volume, can be used as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup. If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental—only the blocks on the device that have changed after your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally,
the built in durability of EBS is comparable to a RAID in the physical sense. The data itself is mirrored (think more like a RAID stripe though) in the availability zone where the volume exists. Amazon states that the failure rate is somewhere around 0.1-0.5% annually. This is more reliable than most physical RAID setups
i m running ec2 instance in 1 region i want to create snapshots of ec2 instances in other region directly without coping and cross region replication in s3, is this possible? if possible then how?
Amazon EBS Snapshots are created in the same region as the original EBS Volume. They can then be used to create a new Volume within the same Region.
If you wish to use an Amazon EBS Snapshot in a different region, the snapshot must first be copied to the other Region. This can done via the Amazon EC2 management console, the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI) aws ec2 copy-snapshot command, or an AWS API call.
Please note that snapshots are incremental backups. The first snapshot isn't really a full backup. Rather, every snapshot simply copies any blocks that have been modified since any previous snapshot. Blocks are retained while snapshots still require the blocks. This means that blocks made during the initial snapshot could actually be deleted if they are not required by any active snapshots. This is why I say they are not the same as a full backup, which traditionally never has content deleted.
However, when a snapshot is copied to a new region it is copied in full, rather than incrementally.
If you do not with to copy an EBS snapshot between regions, you would need to find a different way to transfer the disk volume (eg filesystem-level synchronisation).
In fact, there should typically be no need to transfer a disk volume -- rather, your systems should be capable of configuring a new server based upon a startup configuration script and data should be stored in a separate database so that it is accessible to multiple instances. It is a very rare case that requires a complete copy of a disk volume.
If I have snapshots S1, S2, S3 which are taken while data varying in EBS. S1 is oldest snapshot and S3 is latest snapshot. If I delete the S1, does S3 has all the latest data which was there by the time of taking S3 snapshot on EBS?
When you delete a snapshot, only the data exclusive to that snapshot is removed. Deleting previous snapshots of a volume do not affect your ability to restore volumes from later snapshots of that volume.
If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental so that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally, the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the volume.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-deleting-snapshot.html