EC2 creating images

Question

Hi. I have two EC2 instances running linux which I use as a web/database server and a mail server. I occasionally want to back-up both of these as AMI images. What I now do is "Stop Instance", then I select "Create Image". I then wait until the images have finished creating ( I watch the progress under Elastic Block Store>Snapshots). When the images show 100% completion, I start my instances again and my backup is finished. I would like to know, is it ok to start the EC2 instances up before the image creation is complete? I am trying to minimize my downtime, which currently is about 15 minutes.

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can restart everything once the snapshot gets to 'pending' according to the documentation, [Create Amazon EBS snapshots](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-creating-snapshot.html):

```
Snapshots occur asynchronously; the point-in-time snapshot is created immediately, but the status of the snapshot is pending until the snapshot is complete (when all of the modified blocks have been transferred to Amazon S3), which can take several hours for large initial snapshots or subsequent snapshots where many blocks have changed. While it is completing, an in-progress snapshot is not affected by ongoing reads and writes to the volume.
```

EC2 creating images

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