How do I recreate or recover a terminated Amazon EC2 instance?

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My Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance was terminated, but I want to recover or restore data from that EC2 instance.

Resolution

Restore your instance

As part of instance termination, Amazon EC2 deletes the data on the instance store volumes and the root Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume.

You can't recover the original instance or volumes that Amazon EC2 deleted as part of the termination process. Instead, you must use one of the following methods to recreate the terminated instance:

Use Amazon EBS snapshots or Amazon Machine Images (AMI) backups that you created before you terminated the instance to launch a new instance.
Attach an EBS volume from the terminated instance to another EC2 instance. You can then access the data in the attached volumes.
Use AWS Backup to restore the instance from a set recovery point or to restore the instance's EBS volume.

Prevent future instance or volume deletion

Update your instance settings

Take the following actions:

Set Termination protection to Enable to prevent accidental instance termination.
Set DeleteOnTermination to False when you launch the instance so that Amazon EC2 doesn't delete the EBS volumes on instance termination.
Note: When you set DeleteOnTermination to False, you can use the same EBS volume to redeploy the instance.
Change the instance shutdown behavior to Stop instead of Terminate.
If the instance is part of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, then customize the termination policy or use scale-in protection.

Create frequent backups of your instance

Important: Don't store critical data on instance store volumes.

Create frequent Amazon EBS-backed AMIs to capture the instance's configuration, such as its operating system (OS), software, settings, and block device mappings. Also, create snapshots of your volumes to capture a point-in-time backup of your volume's data. Make sure that your file system is in a consistent state before you create the snapshot.

To schedule daily incremental snapshots with automated retention policies, use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager. Or, use AWS Backup plans to back up your AWS resources and backup policies to manage backup plans across AWS accounts and AWS Regions. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager and AWS Backup to manage AMIs.

Restrict access to instance termination actions

Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and service controls policies (SCPs) to restrict access to the following actions: