Amazon EBS Backed Instances and Snapshots

Question

Is there a way other than rsync to backup the contents of an Amazon snapshot? Amazon's customer service is very slow and unspecific about what ec2-other breaks down into. I don't have a single running instance or any attached volumes provisioned for IOPS, and yet I am getting dinged every month for reasons unknown. Is there really no way to backup a few hundred gigs on there without paying several hundred dollars a month?

Thank you for demystifying this.

Answer 1

If I understand you correct, you are looking for a solution that will speed up the backup process. Try Cloudberry as a backup agent. It works with Amazon and other cloud storages that may be more attractive to you. Have you considered such an option - to change the cloud storage?

Answer 2

Which OS are you using , Windows or Linux ? What is that you want to backup? Is it the entire AWS EC2 instance or Volumes? If you don't need to backup the entire EC2 instance, stick to the volumes only and you can create EBS snapshots of the volumes which can be easily restored in another EC2 instance within the same or different region. If you want to backup the entire EC2 instance you can create AMIs for the instance.

With Linux, you can take a snapshot of each volume of an instance, then create new AMIs from those snapshots. As a result, instances can be launched from the newly created AMIs. However, when you take snapshots of a Windows instance, you can recover the volume from that snapshot, but you cannot create an AMI and launch an instance.

You can easily create the backup manually using AWS console. Also, you can automate the process by using shell script in AWS Command Line Interface. For details refer the link-: https://n2ws.com/blog/how-to-guides/automate-amazon-ec2-instance-backup