Creating Amazon EBS snapshots - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Snapshot encryptionMulti-volume snapshotsAmazon Data Lifecycle ManagerConsiderationsCreating a snapshotCreating a multi-volume snapshotWorking with EBS snapshots

Creating Amazon EBS snapshots

To create an application-consistent snapshot, see Creating a VSS Application-Consistent Snapshot Restoring Volumes from VSS-Enabled EBS snapshots.

You can create a point-in-time snapshot of an EBS volume and use it as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup. If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental—the new snapshot saves only the blocks that have changed since your last snapshot.

Snapshots occur asynchronously; the point-in-time snapshot is created immediately, but the status of the snapshot is pending until the snapshot is complete (when all of the modified blocks have been transferred to Amazon S3), which can take several hours for large initial snapshots or subsequent snapshots where many blocks have changed. While it is completing, an in-progress snapshot is not affected by ongoing reads and writes to the volume.

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 might 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 can't pause all file writes to the volume, you should unmount the volume from within the instance, issue the snapshot command, and then remount the volume to ensure a consistent and complete snapshot. You can remount and use your volume while the snapshot status is pending.

To make snapshot management easier, you can tag your snapshots during creation or add tags afterward. For example, you can apply tags describing the original volume from which the snapshot was created, or the device name that was used to attach the original volume to an instance. For more information, see Tagging your Amazon EC2 resources.

Snapshot encryption

Snapshots that are taken from encrypted volumes are automatically encrypted. Volumes that are created from encrypted snapshots are also automatically encrypted. The data in your encrypted volumes and any associated snapshots is protected both at rest and in motion. For more information, see Amazon EBS encryption.

By default, only you can create volumes from snapshots that you own. However, you can share your unencrypted snapshots with specific AWS accounts, or you can share them with the entire AWS community by making them public. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS snapshot.

You can share an encrypted snapshot only with specific AWS accounts. For others to use your shared, encrypted snapshot, you must also share the CMK key that was used to encrypt it. Users with access to your encrypted snapshot must create their own personal copy of it and then use that copy. Your copy of a shared, encrypted snapshot can also be re-encrypted using a different key. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS snapshot.

Note

If you copy a snapshot and encrypt it to a new CMK, a complete (non-incremental) copy is always created, resulting in additional delay and storage costs.

Multi-volume snapshots

You can create multi-volume snapshots, which are point-in-time snapshots for all EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance. You can also create lifecycle policies to automate the creation and retention of multi-volume snapshots. For more information, see Automating the Amazon EBS snapshot lifecycle.

After the snapshots are created, each snapshot is treated as an individual snapshot. You can perform all snapshot operations, such as restore, delete, and copy across Regions or accounts, just as you would with a single volume snapshot. You can also tag your multi-volume snapshots as you would a single volume snapshot. We recommend you tag your multiple volume snapshots to manage them collectively during restore, copy, or retention.

Multi-volume, crash-consistent snapshots are typically restored as a set. It is helpful to identify the snapshots that are in a crash-consistent set by tagging your set with the instance ID, name, or other relevant details. You can also choose to automatically copy tags from the source volume to the corresponding snapshots. This helps you to set the snapshot metadata, such as access policies, attachment information, and cost allocation, to match the source volume.

After it's created, a multi-volume snapshot behaves like any other snapshot. You can perform all operations, such as restore, delete, and copy across Regions and accounts. You can also tag your snapshots. We recommend that you tag your multi-volume snapshots to collectively manage them during restore, copy, or retention.

After creating your snapshots, they appear in your EC2 console created at the exact point-in-time. The snapshots are collectively managed and, therefore, if any one snapshot for the volume set fails, all of the other snapshots display an error status.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

You can create, retain, and delete snapshots manually, or you can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to manage your snapshots for you. For more information, see Automating snapshots.

Considerations

The following considerations apply to creating snapshots:

  • When you create a snapshot for an EBS volume that serves as a root device, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.

  • You cannot create snapshots from instances for which hibernation is enabled.

  • You cannot create snapshots from hibernated instances.

  • Although you can take a snapshot of a volume while a previous snapshot of that volume is in the pending status, having multiple pending snapshots of a volume can result in reduced volume performance until the snapshots complete.

  • There is a limit of five pending snapshots for a single gp2, io1, or Magnetic volume, and one pending snapshot for a single st1 or sc1 volume. If you receive a ConcurrentSnapshotLimitExceeded error while trying to create multiple concurrent snapshots of the same volume, wait for one or more of the pending snapshots to complete before creating another snapshot of that volume.

  • When a snapshot is created from a volume with an AWS Marketplace product code, the product code is propagated to the snapshot.

Creating a snapshot

Use the following procedure to create a snapshot from the specified volume.

To create a snapshot using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. Choose Snapshots under Elastic Block Store in the navigation pane.

  3. Choose Create Snapshot.

  4. For Select resource type, choose Volume.

  5. For Volume, select the volume.

  6. (Optional) Enter a description for the snapshot.

  7. (Optional) Choose Add Tag to add tags to your snapshot. For each tag, provide a tag key and a tag value.

  8. Choose Create Snapshot.

To create a snapshot using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

Creating a multi-volume snapshot

Use the following procedure to create a snapshot from the volumes of an instance.

To create multi-volume snapshots using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. Choose Snapshots under Elastic Block Store in the navigation pane.

  3. Choose Create Snapshot.

  4. For Select resource type, choose Instance.

  5. Select the instance ID for which you want to create simultaneous backups for all of the attached EBS volumes. Multi-volume snapshots support up to 40 EBS volumes per instance.

  6. (Optional) Set Exclude root volume.

  7. (Optional) Set Copy tags from volume flag to automatically copy tags from the source volume to the corresponding snapshots. This sets snapshot metadata—such as access policies, attachment information, and cost allocation—to match the source volume.

  8. (Optional) Choose Add Tag to add tags to your snapshot. For each tag, provide a tag key and a tag value.

  9. Choose Create Snapshot.

    During snapshot creation, the snapshots are managed together. If one of the snapshots in the volume set fails, the other snapshots are moved to error status for the volume set. You can monitor the progress of your snapshots using CloudWatch Events. After the snapshot creation process completes, CloudWatch generates an event that contains the status and all of the relevant snapshots details for the affected instance.

To create multi-volume snapshots using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

To create application-consistent snapshots using Systems Manager Run Command

You can use Systems Manager Run Command to take application-consistent snapshots of all EBS volumes attached to your Amazon EC2 Windows instances. The snapshot process uses the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to take image-level backups of VSS-aware applications, including data from pending transactions between these applications and the disk. You don't need to shut down your instances or disconnect them when you back up all attached volumes. For more information, see Creating a VSS Application-Consistent Snapshot Restoring Volumes from VSS-Enabled EBS snapshots.

Working with EBS snapshots

You can copy snapshots, share snapshots, and create volumes from snapshots. For more information, see the following: