TABLE OF CONTENT
1. Overview2. Amazon EBS Snapshots AWS EBS Snapshots Use cases Step-by-Step Guide to Make a Snapshot Steps to copy a Snapshot6. Steps to share Snapshot7. Conclusion8. About CloudThat9. FAQs
Overview
Data security is essential for today’s growing businesses. Data security is essential in today’s growing businesses. Traditionally, a backup copy of the data was kept in local systems in case of accidental data loss. A backup of the data is not sufficient for real-time applications that ingest large amounts of information frequently.
Data is stored on the same storage array as a typical on-premises storage snapshot. In this way, you can lose both the source data as well as the snapshots if the storage array crashes.
Amazon EBS Snapshots
EBS snapshots prevent data loss by storing snapshots on EBS volumes on AWS S3, which is a different storage level. You can back up your Amazon EBS volumes data to Amazon S3 by taking point-in time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups. This means that they only retain the blocks that have changed since the last snapshot. It reduces the time required to create the snapshot and saves storage costs by avoiding data duplicates. Each snapshot contains all information required to restore your data to an EBS volume.
AWS EBS Snapshots Use cases
Data backup: Amazon EBS Snapshots are recommended by AWS for backing up Amazon EC2 instances as well as their data volumes off site, off-AZ, and off-region. Amazon EBS snapshots allow you to easily take a snapshot from a running EC2 instance with its data. The data is then automatically moved from the EBS volume into Amazon S3 for long term storage. These snapshots can also be used by third-party backup software to protect EC2 instances during the backup process.
Disaster Recovery: Amazon EBS snapshots are used to provide data replication to multiple AWS regions. This provides a DR capability to Amazon EC2 instances using the snapshot copy feature.
Learn more about Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing
You can create an EBS snapshot using the console or the AWS CLI command create-snapshot.
Step-by-Step Guide to Make a Snapshot
Log in to AWS Console and select Amazon EC2 service
Click Snapshots under Elastic Block Store in the navigation pane
Click on Create Snapshot
Choose Volume as the resource type
Select the volume to get Volume ID
Please provide the name and description of the snapshot. (Optional)
Add tag. Add a tag. (Optional)
Click on Take a picture
How to copy an Amazon EBS Snapshot
Amazon EBS allows you to create snapshots of volumes at a point in time. These snapshots will be stored by Amazon S3. A snapshot can be copied from one AWS Region (or within the same Region) after it has completed copying to Amazon S3 (when its snapshot status is complete). The snapshot copy’s ID is different from the original snapshot’s ID.
Steps to create a Snapshot
Click Snapshots in the navigation pane
Select the snapshot you wish to copy, then click Copy from the Actions List
Give the description of the snapshot
Select the Destination Region where you would like the snapshot to appear.
If encryption is enabled by default on your account, or if the original snapshot has been encrypted, the snapshot copy will be encrypted by default. You cannot change the encryption state. Encryption is optional if the source snapshot is not encrypted and your account has not been enabled for encryption by default. Check the Encrypt this snapshot option to encrypt the snapshot copy. Next, choose the appropriate KMS Key for the snapshot copy.
Copy the snapshot
Sharing the Snapshot
If you wish to share a snapshot with other AWS accounts, you can change permissions. You can share snapshots with all AWS accounts publicly or privately with only one account.
