How do I back up an instance store volume on my Amazon EC2 instance to Amazon EBS?

Short description

It's a best practice to keep backups of all data that you store in your AWS infrastructure. This allows you to roll back changes and protect your data from application failures and infrastructure events.

You can back up data stored on an instance store volume in one of the following ways:

• Create a new EBS volume, and then copy the data on your instance store volume to the EBS volume.
• Back up the individual files stored on an Amazon EBS volume.

Resolution

Create a new EBS volume and migrate your data

1. Create an EBS volume. Select a size large enough to hold the data that you're migrating.
2. Attach the EBS volume to your instance.
3. Make the volume available to your operating system, and then create a compatible file system on the volume. For Linux instances, see Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Linux. For Windows instances, see Make an Amazon EBS volume available for use on Windows.
4. Use a disk management or migration tool to copy the data for your operating system, such as rsync for Linux or robocopy for Windows. For more information on rsync, see rsync(1) on the Linux man page. For more information on robocopy, see robocopy in the Microsoft documentation.

Note: Keep both volumes available until you're sure that the copy operation is successful and completed. You might need to perform additional configuration before the new EBS volumes are usable with your instance.

Back up individual files stored on an EBS volume

You can back up individual files instead of or in addition to backing up the volume itself. For an example solution using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), see Getting the most out of the Amazon S3 CLI.

Related information

Create an instance store-backed Linux AMI