How do I back up my Amazon EBS volumes?

Short description

Use either the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) console or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to create a snapshot of your EBS volumes. The snapshot is a backup of your EBS volume.

Important: Make sure that you create the snapshot in the same AWS Region as the volume.

Resolution

Note: If you receive errors when you run AWS CLI commands, then see Troubleshooting errors for the AWS CLI. Also, make sure that you're using the most recent AWS CLI version.

Use the Amazon EC2 console

Complete the following steps:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console.
2. In the navigation pane, under Elastic Block Store, choose Volumes, and then select the volume that you want to back up.
3. Choose Actions, and then choose Create snapshot.

Use the AWS CLI

Run the following create-snapshot AWS CLI command:

aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id your_volume_id --description "Your description"

Note: Replace your_volume_id with your volume ID and "Your description" with a description of your backup.

You can also create multi-volume snapshots that are point-in-time snapshots of volumes that are attached to an Amazon EC2 instance. To automate snapshot creation and retention, use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

Note: Snapshot creation incurs charges. You're billed for the amount of data that you store. For more information, see How am I billed for my Amazon EBS snapshots?