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Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot
After writing data to an Amazon EBS volume, you can periodically create a snapshot of the volume to use as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup. 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.
Snapshots occur asynchronously and the status of the snapshot is pending
until the snapshot is complete.
By default, only you can launch volumes from snapshots that you own. However, you can choose to share your snapshots with specific AWS accounts or make them public. For more information, see Modifying Snapshot Permissions.
When a snapshot is created, any AWS Marketplace product codes from the volume are propagated to the snapshot.
You can take a snapshot of an attached volume that is in use. However, snapshots only capture data that has been written to your Amazon EBS volume at the time the snapshot command is issued. This may exclude any data that has been cached by any applications or the operating system. If you can pause any file writes to the volume long enough to take a snapshot, your snapshot should be complete. However, if you cannot pause all file writes to the volume, you need to unmount the volume from within the instance, issue the snapshot command, and then remount the volume to ensure a consistent and complete snapshot.
To create a snapshot for Amazon EBS volumes that serve as root devices, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.
To unmount the volume in Linux/UNIX
Enter the following command from the command line.
umount -d
device_nameFor example:
#umount -d /dev/sdh
To unmount the volume in Windows
In Disk Management, right-click the volume to unmount, and select Change Drive Letter and Path.
Select the mount point to remove and click Remove.
AWS Management Console
To create a snapshot
Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Click Snapshots in the navigation pane.
The console displays a list of current snapshots.
Click Create Snapshot.
The Create Snapshot dialog box appears.
Select the volume to create a snapshot for and click Create.
Amazon EC2 begins creating the snapshot.
Command Line Interface
To create a snapshot, use the ec2-create-snapshot command.
PROMPT>ec2-create-snapshotvolume_id
Amazon EC2 returns information similar to the following example.
SNAPSHOT snap-88fe11e0 vol-c7f95aae pending 2010-03-30T14:10:38+0000 111122223333 80
When the snapshot is complete, its status changes to completed.
API
To create a snapshot, use the CreateSnapshot action. Construct the following request.
https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=CreateSnapshot
&VolumeId=volume-id
&AUTHPARAMSThe following is an example response.
<CreateSnapshotResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2013-02-01/"> <requestId>fe0d60a3-b804-484e-b558-92518bebe7af</requestId> <snapshotId>snap-05b4aa6c</snapshotId> <volumeId>vol-d11fbbb8</volumeId> <status>pending</status> <startTime>2010-03-23T09:43:51.000Z</startTime> <progress/> <ownerId>999988887777</ownerId> <volumeSize>20</volumeSize> <description/> </CreateSnapshotResponse>
