This operation initiates a snapshot of a volume.

AWS Storage Gateway provides the ability to back up point-in-time snapshots of your data to Amazon Simple Storage (S3) for durable off-site recovery, as well as 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 ad-hoc snapshot. For more information, see Working With Snapshots in the AWS Storage Gateway Console .

In the CreateSnapshot request you identify the volume by providing its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You must also provide description for the snapshot. When AWS Storage Gateway takes the snapshot of specified volume, the snapshot and description appears in the AWS Storage Gateway Console. In response, AWS 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.

NOTE:To list or delete a snapshot, you must use the Amazon EC2 API. For more information, .