Delete the oldest AWS EC2 snapshots - amazon-web-services

Question

I'm trying to remove all my AWS EC2 snapshots except the last 6 with this script:
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games
# Backup script
Volume="{VOL-DATA}"
Owner="{OWNER}"
Description="{DESCRIPTION}"
Local_numbackups=6
Local_region="us-west-1"
# Remove old snapshots associated to a description, keep the last $Local_numbackups
aws ec2 describe-snapshots --filters Name=description,Values=$Description | grep "SnapshotId" | head -n -$Local_numbackups | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/,//g' | xargs -n 1 -t aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id
However it doesn't work. It deletes instances, but not the oldest ones. Why?

Answer 1

You're trying to do something too complex to be handled (gracefully) in one line, so we'll need to break it down a bit. First, let's get the snapshots sorted by age, oldest to newest:
aws ec2 describe-snapshots --filters Name=description,Values=$Description --query 'Snapshots[*].[StartTime,SnapshotId]' --output text | sort -n
Then we can drop the StartTime field to get the snapshot ID alone:
aws ec2 describe-snapshots --filters Name=description,Values=$Description --query 'Snapshots[*].[StartTime,SnapshotId]' --output text | sort -n | sed -e 's/^.*\t//'
head (or tail) aren't really suitable for discarding the fixed number of snapshots we want to keep. We need to filter those out another way. So, putting it altogether:
# Get array of snapshot IDs sorted by age (oldest to newest)
snapshots=($(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --filters Name=description,Values=$Description --query 'Snapshots[*].[StartTime,SnapshotId]' --output text | sort -n | sed -e 's/^.*\t//'))
# Get number of snapshots
count=${#snapshots[#]}
if [ "$count" -lt "$Local_numbackups" ]; then
echo "We already have less than $Local_numbackups snapshots"
exit 0
else
# Drop the last (newest) $Local_numbackups IDs from the array
snapshots=(${snapshots[#]:0:$((count - Local_numbackups))})
# Loop through the remaining snapshots and delete
for snapshot in ${snapshots[#]}; do
aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $snapshot
done
fi
(While it's obviously possible to do this in bash with the AWS CLI, it's complex enough that I'd personally rather use a more robust language and the AWS SDK.)

Answer 2

Here is a sample.
days2keep="30"
region="us-west-2"
name="jdoe"
#date - -v is for Osx
cutoffdate=`date -j -v-${days2keep}d '+%Y-%m-%d'`
echo "Finding list of snapshots before $cutoffdate "
oldsnapids=$(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --region $region --filters Name=tag:Name,Values=$name --query Snapshots[?StartTime\<=\`$cutoffdate\`].SnapshotId --output text)
for snapid in $oldsnapids
do
echo Deleting snapshot $snapid
aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $snapid --region $region
done

Answer 3

We can delete all old snapshots using below steps:-
List out all snapshots ID's they are old and put in one file like:- /opt/snapshot.txt
And then use "aws configure" command for setup access AWS account from command line, at this time we need to provide credentials:-
Such as:
AWS Access Key ID [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Default region name [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
After that we can use below shell script, we need to give snapshots ID's file name
Codes:
#!/bin/bash
list=$(cat /opt/snapshot.txt)
for i in $list
do
aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $i
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo Going Good
else
echo FAIL
fi
done
Thanks