EBS Snapshots: Simple, Secure Block Storage Data Protection

Amazon EBS Snapshots: Simple, secure block storage data preservation.

What is Amazon EBS Snapshots?

Amazon EBS snapshots can backup your data. A snapshot is an incremental backup, saving only the volume blocks that changed since the last snapshot. This reduces snapshot creation time and storage costs by avoiding duplicating data.

Amazon S3 buckets keep snapshots in inaccessible locations. You may create and manage snapshots using the Amazon EC2 console or API. You can’t access snapshots via Amazon S3 interface or API.

Each snapshot provides all the data needed to restore your data to a fresh EBS volume. An EBS volume created from a snapshot is an exact clone of the snapshot volume.

Why EBS Snapshots?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots simply and securely protect block storage data including EBS volumes, boot volumes, and on-premises block data. EBS Snapshots make a snapshot of your data for disaster recovery, data migration across regions and accounts, and backup compliance.

Use the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs to create and manage EBS Snapshots. You can establish policies to automate snapshot lifecycle management with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) and Amazon EBS Snapshots. Incremental EBS Snapshots imply you only pay for modified blocks.

Benefits

Easy to use and automated

It simplify EBS volume backups. Amazon S3 stores snapshots automatically for future use. Through integration with DLM, which enables you to establish policies that automate various processes such as snapshot creation, deletion, retention, and sharing, AWS further streamlines the lifecycle management of your snapshots. This lessens the operational strain of snapshot management and lowers storage expenses because DLM automatically removes out-of-date backups in accordance with your defined policies.

Cost-effective

Cost-effective and perfect for regular backups, Amazon EBS snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot. You may monitor snapshot usage and expenditures using tools like AWS Cost Explorer, and if necessary, further optimize storage expenses. For the long-term (over 90 days) retention of rarely visited snapshots, use the EBS Snapshots Archive to save up to 75% on snapshot storage expenses. Additionally, a pay-as-you-go cloud model drastically lowers your capital expenditure because you don’t have to foresee or make provisions for the future.

Safeguard

Instead of requiring you to create, administer, and safeguard your own key management infrastructure, Amazon EBS provides a straightforward encryption solution for your EBS resources. Encrypting new EBS volumes and snapshots, including snapshots of your on-premises data, is simple to set up with your AWS account. Additionally, by limiting public access to your EBS Snapshots, you may stop illegal access to your data. To prevent unintentional or intentional deletions, you can also set locks on your EBS snapshots.

Highly available and durable

You can easily backup your EBS volumes with Amazon EBS Snapshots. Amazon S3 is automatically used to store the snapshots for later use. With S3’s 99.99999999% (11 nines) durability design, your EBS snapshots will be more readily available. Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots improves durability by enabling one-click or API-call recovery of inadvertently erased snapshots. A recovered snapshot allows you to quickly and simply restore your snapshot back to production by preserving the original’s status data and descriptions.

Use Cases

Disaster Recovery

You can enhance disaster recovery procedures for your workloads running on-premises and on AWS at a reasonable cost by using Amazon EBS Snapshots. EBS volumes or data on-premises can be directly snapshotted, and these snapshots can subsequently be used for cloud recovery. By using the Fast Snapshot Restore functionality, you may accomplish minimal recovery time goals and swiftly restore data from these snapshots into EBS volumes.

Data transfer

Moving data between accounts, regions, and availability zones is simple with Amazon EBS Snapshots. Any snapshot that is available to you can be copied to a different location or account, including ones that you have taken or that have been shared with you. Additionally, snapshots can be copied to produce Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are sold on the AWS Marketplace and can be used to start new EC2 instances in different accounts or regions. You may also move your on-premises data to AWS by taking snapshots of it and restoring it into EBS volumes.

Backup conformance

By implementing DLM settings to enforce a regular backup schedule, Amazon EBS Snapshots helps you safeguard your priceless data. To increase internal compliance, you might establish rules requiring backups to be kept on file as needed by auditors. Additionally, you may log, track, and save account activity relevant to activities made for your snapshots by integrating EBS Snapshots with AWS CloudTrail.

Amazon EBS pricing

Amazon EBS charges just for what you provide. Volume storage for all EBS volume types is charged by GB provisioned each month until released. Costs rise for EBS volumes that support more IOPs and throughput than baseline.

Amazon EBS Snapshots pricing

Point-in-time copies of your block data are called Amazon EBS snapshots. You are only charged for the modified blocks that are stored since EBS snapshots in the Standard tier are progressively stored. You are charged for all of the blocks stored, not just the modified blocks, because EBS Snapshots in the Archive tier are complete copies of your block data. The minimum retention time for snapshots in the Archive tier is ninety days. A prorated fee equivalent to the storage fee for the remaining days will be applied to archived pictures that are erased or permanently restored to the Standard tier prior to the 90-day mark. Retrievals from the Archive tier incur additional fees.

Bin for Recycling EBS Snapshots

Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots prevents unintentional deletions. Recycle Bin EBS Snapshots cost the same as Amazon Snapshots.

Fast Snapshot Restore for Amazon EBS

Regardless of the size of the volume or snapshot, you may quickly restore fully provisioned EBS volumes from snapshots using Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). On snapshots that you own or that have been shared with you, FSR can be enabled. Each snapshot and each Availability Zone where FSR is enabled are billed in Data Services Unit-Hours (DSU-Hours). DSUs entail a minimum of one hour and a billing rate per minute. Until you disable an FSR-enabled snapshot, you will still be charged for it.

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