Creates a snapshot of an EBS volume and stores it in Amazon S3. You can use snapshots for backups, to make copies of EBS volumes, and to save data before shutting down an instance.
You can create snapshots of volumes in a Region and volumes on an Outpost. If you create a snapshot of a volume in a Region, the snapshot must be stored in the same Region as the volume. If you create a snapshot of a volume on an Outpost, the snapshot can be stored on the same Outpost as the volume, or in the Region for that Outpost.
When a snapshot is created, any Amazon Web Services Marketplace product codes that are associated with the source 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 might exclude any data that has been cached by any applications or the operating system. If you can pause any file systems on 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 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 may remount and use your volume while the snapshot status is
pending.
When you create a snapshot for an EBS volume that serves as a root device, we recommend that you stop the instance before taking the snapshot.
Snapshots that are taken from encrypted volumes are automatically encrypted. Volumes that are created from encrypted snapshots are also automatically encrypted. Your encrypted volumes and any associated snapshots always remain protected.
You can tag your snapshots during creation. For more information, see
Tag your Amazon EC2 resources in the
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
For more information, see
Amazon Elastic Block Store and
Amazon EBS encryption in the
Amazon EBS User Guide.