Posted On: Sep 1, 2022
In May 2019, HAQM Elastic Block Store (EBS) launched the ability for customers to take crash-consistent snapshots of all HAQM EBS volumes attached to an HAQM EC2 instance with a single API call. Now you can choose to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of HAQM EBS data volumes attached to an HAQM EC2 instance. You can also use HAQM Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate taking crash-consistent snapshots of the same subset of HAQM EBS volumes on a retention schedule defined by DLM policies.
HAQM EBS Snapshots are point-in-time copies of HAQM EBS volumes stored on HAQM S3. Customers use snapshots in their backup or disaster recovery plans. Snapshots are commonly used to create a backup of a critical workload such as a large database or file system. Customers often have multiple EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance. Some of these volumes may belong to different applications or may contain temporary data such as cache. As a result, a subset of these volumes may not need to be backed up.
With this change, you can now choose to snapshot only the HAQM EBS volumes you want using a single API call or the HAQM EC2 console, also saving cost. If you are using DLM, you can set your policies to automatically backup the subset of volumes using DLM policies and tags. This saves you from having to manage scripts, or manually delete the snapshots you don’t want, thus simplifying your operations.
This capability is available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console in AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East) regions in addition to all AWS commercial regions.