import ec2 linux/ windows snapshot to s3

It is not possible to directly export EC2 snapshots (for Linux/Windows) to S3 and vice versa. You may find this inconvenient, but this limitation exists because EBS snapshots are not just regular disk images; they are block-level copies of your volumes and include a certain amount of metadata.

Here are some potential workarounds:

• EC2 Instance User Volume to S3: You can copy data from an EC2 instance to an S3 bucket manually. Mount the EBS volume as a secondary drive on a running EC2 instance, then use the AWS CLI aws s3 sync or aws s3 cp commands to upload the data from the volume to your S3 bucket. This approach does not capture the full system state like an EBS snapshot, but you could use it for specific data or applications.

• Create an AMI and download the AMI files: If you want to backup the entire instance, you can create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the instance and then use an AWS provided tool like ec2-download-bundle to download the AMI files to your local machine. However, the downloaded file is in a specific format and you would need to use an AWS provided tool like ec2-upload-bundle to upload it back to AWS and register it as an AMI.

• Use third-party solutions: Some third-party solutions or services might provide this capability by internally converting the snapshot to a format that can be stored in S3. But it's important to consider that these solutions may come with their own costs and complexities.

If you want to minimize the cost of snapshots, consider the following:

• Delete old snapshots that are no longer needed.
• For DR purposes, consider using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) or similar to periodically test a few snapshots rather than all of them.
• Use GP3 volumes instead of GP2 or IO1/IO2 if possible, as snapshots of GP3 volumes are cheaper.
• Use incremental snapshots. The cost of a snapshot is based on the total size of data stored in the snapshot. However, AWS EBS snapshots are incremental, meaning that only the blocks that have changed since your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot.

Remember, data in S3 is not as immediately accessible as data in EBS snapshots. Restoring large volumes of data from S3 to an EBS volume or EC2 instance can take a long time and potentially increase your data transfer costs. Make sure to weigh these considerations when deciding how to backup your data. If you need to keep regular, full backups of your EC2 instances for a long time, AWS Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive might be a more cost-effective solution than S3.

Thanks, Ercan I tried Ami's way I encountered such an error, have managed to export the whole ami image to s3 but cannot import it to aws from s3 as an ami image "Status": "deleted", "StatusMessage": "ClientError: Unsupported kernel version 5.15.0-1035-aws", "Tags": [] }