EBS Snapshots: how data works with incremental backups? - amazon-web-services

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

Related

AMI EC2 EBS Backup- cost forecasting

Actually I have to take forecast of costing for one my instance, which is having a number of volumes attached... These volumes are different in size and types.
Let's suppose I took the AMI backup and terminated the server.
Now my confusion is how would I calculate the cost. The cost will be calculated based on pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot. Because the cost difference is just double.
Let me know if you can help me understanding.
pricing of Amazon EBS Volumes or Amazon EBS Snapshot Which I took from AWS Pricing :
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
Amazon EBS snapshots are a complex subject due to the way they work.
There is a detailed explanation in: Amazon EBS snapshots - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
A quick summary is:
Snapshots contain only the data that is different to previous snapshots (they are incremental)
An AMI is actually a snapshot. So, if you booted a new Amazon EC2 instance from an AMI and then created a snapshot, the snapshot would contain very little since most of the volume was already contained in the previous snapshot (that was part of the AMI). Confused yet?
Any snapshot can be deleted and information will still be retained to allow any other snapshot to be restored. So, the snapshot is actually an 'index' to the snapshot data, and the snapshot data is stored separately to the snapshot itself. You should be questioning your sanity at this point!
So, the cost of Amazon EBS snapshots is mostly based on how much the contents of the volume changes, and how many snapshots (effectively, points-in-time) you wish to keep. If you only keep the most recent snapshot, then all data will be available, but the cost will be minimised because it won't keep any data that has been deleted from the volume.
Bottom line: Snapshots take less space than the data on a volume due to the incremental natures. The more snapshots ("points-in-time"), the more data will be kept and hence the more cost.

Amazon Aurora Snapshot backups are full or incremental?

RDS Snapshot backup is full backup in the first time, and the second snapshot is incremental backup. I can find out about this in the following documents.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_WorkingWithAutomatedBackups.html
The first snapshot of a DB instance contains the data for the full DB instance. Subsequent snapshots of the same DB instance are incremental, which means that only the data that has changed after your most recent snapshot is saved.
I'd like to know Aurora's snapshot taking is a full backup or a differential.
Does anyone have any information on this?
I've checked the following in the manual, but I can't confirm that Aurora's snapshot works with this text.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html
Aurora backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the length of the backup retention period. Aurora backups are continuous and incremental so you can quickly restore to any point within the backup retention period.
And, I've checked the AWS re:Invent 2019 materials below. I thought take a full image snapshot of in each segment(per 10GB protection groups), does this right?
https://youtu.be/Ul-j5fKfv2k?t=1095
AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Deep dive on Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility (DAT328-R1)
AWS works always on incremental snapshots.. Even if you take EBS volume snapshot.. it will be incremental.
Here is the link to aws document. Please search for word incremental on this page
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html
Deepak is correct, look what AWS says in the documentation
Backups
Aurora backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore
data for the length of the backup retention period. Aurora backups
are continuous and incremental so you can quickly restore to any
point within the backup retention period. No performance impact or
interruption of database service occurs as backup data is being
written. You can specify a backup retention period, from 1 to 35 days,
when you create or modify a DB cluster.
If you want to retain a backup beyond the backup retention period, you
can also take a snapshot of the data in your cluster volume. Because
Aurora retains incremental restore data for the entire backup
retention period, you only need to create a snapshot for data that you
want to retain beyond the backup retention period. You can create a
new DB cluster from the snapshot.
Note For Amazon Aurora DB clusters, the default backup retention
period is one day regardless of how the DB cluster is created.
You cannot disable automated backups on Aurora. The backup retention
period for Aurora is managed by the DB cluster.
Your costs for backup storage depend upon the amount of Aurora backup
and snapshot data you keep and how long you keep it. For information
about the storage associated with Aurora backups and snapshots, see
Understanding Aurora Backup Storage Usage. For pricing information
about Aurora backup storage, see Amazon RDS for Aurora Pricing. After
the Aurora cluster associated with a snapshot is deleted, storing that
snapshot incurs the standard backup storage charges for Aurora.
Aurora manual snapshots are technically incremental (only technically). That is why they can be generated so quickly. BUT, they are billed as "full backups".
So if you snapshot your database everyday for 30 days, and the database is on average 10GB large, you will be billed for 30x10GB = 300GB of storage, even if the difference between each snapshots is tiny.
So even if AWS was using about 12GB to store those backups, they will bill you for 300GB.

EBS Snapshot copy across AWS region

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.

EBS Snapshots, who manages backups?

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

Moving EC2 Snapshots to S3 bucket

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.