How to Create an Amazon EBS Snapshot

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: 2009-10-31

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How to Create an Amazon EBS Snapshot

After writing data to an Amazon EBS volume, you can periodically create a snapshot of the volume to use as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup.

[Note] Note

Snapshots occur asynchronously and the status settings of volumes indicate "pending" until they complete.

By default, only you can launch volumes from your snapshots. However, you can choose to share your snapshots with specific users or make them public.

For information on creating an Amazon EBS volume from a snapshot, see Amazon Elastic Block Store.

AWS Management Console

To create a snapshot

  1. Log in to the AWS Management Console and click the Amazon EC2 tab.

  2. Click Snapshots in the Navigation pane.

    The console displays a list of current snapshots.

  3. Click Create Snapshot.

    The Create Snapshot dialog box appears.

  4. Select the volume to create a snapshot for and click Create.

    Amazon EC2 begins creating the snapshot.

Command Line Tools

To create a snapshot

  • Enter the following command.

    PROMPT>  ec2-create-snapshot volume_id

    Amazon EBS returns information similar to the following example.

    SNAPSHOT snap-78a54011 vol-4d826724 pending 2008-02-15T09:03:58+0000
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