Briefly – it’s very easy to backup your new EBS Volumes via the new Amazon AWS console. Amazon give you something called a “Snapshot”, which basically takes a copy of the volume you select. If you have previously taken a snapshot of a volume, the next snapshot will just contain the new/changed data, rather than the entire volume again.

As far as I can tell (please let me know if wrong) but your snapshots are then stored on S3. Even better, you can create new volumes based on your snapshot! A good way to increase your disk space if necessary!

To do this via the console, it’s very very easy. Login to your console and hit “Snapshots” in the left hand menu. Hit the “Create Snapshot” button, and up pops a new window:

Select the volume you wish to take a snapshot of in the dropdown. More information about your volumes can be found in the “Volumes” section of your console. Hit “Create”.

Depending on how big your volume is, your snapshot should appear with the “completed” status in the list. Backup done!

… and some requirements

One thing that you will likely want to do in the future is to be able to replicate one of your instances over and over again, for example if you have a load balanced solution and you need a 3 server web tier that are all replicas of each other. This is where custom AMIs come in. Amazon give you the ability to create your own AMIs from your instances so that you can recreate your instances over and over, however not via the console. It would be great if you could do that! At the moment you have to use the Amazon EC2 API Tools

Will try and cover this off on a Windows 2003 server soon!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 and is filed under AWS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.