AWS offers a snapshot creation service from the EC2 dashboard to make copies of the data stored on the EC2 instances. Creating the first snapshot of the instance copies all the data available on the volume and after that, every instance only copies the unique data blocks made after the previous snapshot. Let’s start with Amazon EBS Snapshots as a backup & data protection service.

What is Amazon EBS Snapshot?

Amazon EBS snapshots provide a simple and secure solution for protecting the block storage data. The user is allowed to create 100,000 snapshots in a single region and they can be copied across availability zones and regions. The user can automate the snapshot creation by using the AWS data lifecycle Manager. On deleting the snapshot, only the data unique to that snapshot is deleted that was stored in the S3 bucket:

Create a Snapshot

To create an EBS snapshot, the user has an EBS volume created and attached to an EC2 instance. Head into the volume by clicking on it and expand the “Actions” menu to click on the “Create snapshot” button:

Type the description of the snapshot for the identification purpose and then click on the “Create snapshot” button:

Head into the snapshot section from the left panel on the EC2 dashboard to validate the snapshot creation:

You have successfully created a snapshot.

Backup & Data Protection

A first snapshot of AWS EBS creates a full backup of the volume attached to the EC2 instance. The next snapshot will create a backup of the data that has been changed after the creation of the first snapshot. The third snapshot and every snapshot after that will be used to copy the data from the additional space added in the volume (if the user added any extra volume to the original one):

Create a Backup of the Volume From Snapshot

To create a backup of the volume, head to the “Snapshots” page and select the snapshot through which the volume will be restored. After that, expand the “Actions” button and click on the “Create volume from snapshot” button:

Configure the volume by selecting the “Volume type”, and “Size” of the volume:

Scroll down the page and click on the “Create Volume” button:

The volume has been created through the snapshot with data backed up in the volume:

The backup volume has been created from the snapshot.

Conclusion

Snapshots are incremental backups as they minimize the time required to create a snapshot and they are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Snapshots can be created from the EC2 platform to protect the data in the EC2 instance. After that, they are used to create a backup of the volume by configuring it from the platform. The user can locate the backup volume from the volume list on the EC2 dashboard.