How do I use the Amazon EC2 console to create Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies from Amazon EBS volumes?

Resolution

You can select one or more Amazon EBS volumes in the Amazon EC2 console to create an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy. You can use these policies to manage snapshots of the Amazon EBS volumes. After you create the policy, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager automatically creates and deletes snapshots based on the policy schedule.

To create an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy complete the following steps:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console.
2. From the navigation pane, choose Volumes.
   Note: Make sure that all the Amazon EBS volumes that you want Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to manage have at least one tag with a key-value pair.
3. Select your Amazon EBS volumes.
4. Choose Actions, and then choose Create snapshot lifecycle policy.
   Note: All the tags for the Amazon EBS volumes selected in the previous step are automatically prefilled under Target resource tags.
5. Define the rest of the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy, including the creation frequency and retention period.

Troubleshoot errors

Missing tags

To create an Amazon EBS snapshot lifecycle policy, your Amazon EBS volumes must have at least one tag with both a key and a value. If you select one or more volumes that don't have tags, then you receive the following error:

"Volume vol-### does not have any tags. Either assign at least one tag key and value pair to the volume, or deselect the volume."

When you remove tags from Amazon EBS volumes after a policy is created, the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager can no longer create snapshots of those volumes. For more information, see Automate backups with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

All the tags of your selected Amazon EBS volumes are prefilled with both keys and values. When other volumes aren't selected, but they have at least one of the prefilled tags, the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy creates and manages the snapshots for those volumes.

Missing values

When you select an Amazon EBS volume with multiple tags, and at least one tag has both a key and a value, Target resource tags is prefilled with tags with both keys and values. Any tags with a key but no value aren't prefilled.

The total number of unique tags in your selected Amazon EBS volumes must be fewer than 45. When the Amazon EBS volume has more than 45 unique tags, you receive the following error:

"The selected volumes have more than 45 tag key and value pairs. You can select volumes that have a maximum of 45 tag key and value pairs."