Initiates a snapshot of a volume.
Storage Gateway provides the ability to back up point-in-time snapshots of your data to Amazon Simple Storage (Amazon S3) for durable off-site recovery, and also import the data to an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You can take snapshots of your gateway volume on a scheduled or ad hoc basis. This API enables you to take an ad hoc snapshot. For more information, see
Editing a snapshot schedule.
In the
CreateSnapshot
request, you identify the volume by providing its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You must also provide description for the snapshot. When Storage Gateway takes the snapshot of specified volume, the snapshot and description appears in the Storage Gateway console. In response, Storage Gateway returns you a snapshot ID. You can use this snapshot ID to check the snapshot progress or later use it when you want to create a volume from a snapshot. This operation is only supported in stored and cached volume gateway type.
To list or delete a snapshot, you must use the Amazon EC2 API. For more information, see
DescribeSnapshots or
DeleteSnapshot in the
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference.
Volume and snapshot IDs are changing to a longer length ID format. For more information, see the important note on the Welcome page.