Simple, secure data protection for your block storage data

Why Amazon EBS Snapshots?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots provide a simple and secure data protection solution that is designed to protect your block storage data such as EBS volumes, boot volumes, as well as on-premises block data. EBS Snapshots are a point-in-time copy of your data, and can be used to enable disaster recovery, migrate data across regions and accounts, and improve backup compliance. You can create and manage your EBS Snapshots through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or the AWS SDKs. Amazon EBS Snapshots also integrate with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM), which allows you to define policies that help you automate snapshot lifecycle management. EBS Snapshots are stored incrementally, which means you are billed only for the changed blocks stored. Get started with Amazon EBS Snapshots today.

Benefits

Simple and automated

Amazon EBS Snapshots are a convenient way to back up your EBS volumes. The snapshots are automatically saved to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long-term retention. AWS further simplifies the lifecycle management of your snapshots through integration with DLM, which allows you to create policies so that you can automate multiple tasks including creation, deletion, retention, and sharing of snapshots. This reduces the operational burden of snapshot management, and also helps reduce storage costs as DLM automatically deletes outdated backups based on your specified policies.

Cost-effective

Amazon EBS Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot, making them cost effective and ideal for frequent backups. You can use tools such as AWS Cost Explorer to track snapshot usage and spend, and further optimize storage costs as needed. Save up to 75% in snapshot storage costs by using EBS Snapshots Archive for the long-term retention (over 90 days) of seldom-accessed snapshots. Additionally, with a pay-as-you-go cloud model, you no longer need to forecast and provision for the future, which significantly reduces your capital expenditure.

Secure

Amazon EBS offers a simple encryption solution for your EBS resources that does not require you to build, maintain, and secure your own key management infrastructure. You can easily configure your AWS account to enforce encryption of any new EBS volumes and snapshots you create, including snapshots of your on-premises data. Additionally, you can prevent unauthorized access to your data by restricting public access to your EBS Snapshots. You can also configure locks on your EBS Snapshots to protect them from accidental or malicious deletions.

Highly available and durable

Amazon EBS Snapshots are a convenient way to back up your EBS volumes. The snapshots are automatically saved to Amazon S3 for long-term retention. S3 is designed for 99.99999999% (11 nines) durability, ensuring higher availability of your EBS Snapshots. Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots enhances durability by allowing you to recover accidentally deleted snapshots with a single click or an API call. A recovered snapshot retains descriptions and status fields of the original, so you can easily and quickly restore your snapshot back to production.