Amazon EBS snapshots
You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes by making point-in-time copies, known as Amazon EBS snapshots. A snapshot is an incremental backup, which means that we save only the blocks on the volume that have changed since the most recent snapshot. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data.
Important
AWS does not automatically back up the data stored on your EBS volumes. For data resiliency and disaster recovery, it is your responsibility to create EBS snapshots on a regular basis, or to set up automatic snapshot creation by using Automate backups with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager or AWS Backup.
Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, in S3 buckets that you can't access directly. You can create and manage your snapshots using the Amazon EC2 console or the Amazon EC2 API. You can't access your snapshots using the Amazon S3 console or the Amazon S3 API.
Snapshot data is automatically replicated across all Availability Zones in the Region. This provides high availability and durability for snapshot data, and enables you to restore volumes in any Availability Zones in that Region.
Each snapshot contains all of the information that is needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume. When you create an EBS volume from a snapshot, the new volume begins as an exact replica of the volume that was used to create the snapshot.
For more information, see the Amazon EBS Snapshots
Snapshot events
You can track the status of your EBS snapshots through CloudWatch Events. For more information, see EBS snapshot events.
Snapshot pricing
Charges for your snapshots are based on the amount of data stored. Because snapshots are incremental, deleting a snapshot might not reduce your data storage costs. Data referenced exclusively by a snapshot is removed when that snapshot is deleted, but data referenced by other snapshots is preserved. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Block Store Volumes and Snapshots in the AWS Billing User Guide.
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