How to ScheduleEBS Snapshot

Posted by alvina on March 31st, 2018

Backups are an integral part of a coders life. Not a task that is often at the forefront of your mind when you hear about a new service. However, AWS makes the mundane task such as a backup simple and easy. Thanks to AWS, you can automate your backups and schedule them according to your needs.

When it comes to backups, it is always good advice to follow best practice. A regular backup of the Amazon EC2 instances using the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshot schedule is great advice. AWS offers an incremental save of all blocks that are changed after the last snapshot has been saved.

AWS gives you an automated solution for incremental snapshots that have a range of structures that automatically take snapshots of EBS volumes.

Creating an AWS EBS snapshot

A baseline for new volumes can be created using snapshots of an EBS volume. The snapshots are saved incrementally, meaning the most recent blocks are saved in the newly created snapshot. However, deleting the snapshots requires that you maintain the recent snapshot so you can restore the whole volume.

Snapshots are created in real-time but will remain ‘pending’ till the snapshot is complete. This process is a lengthy one as it depends on the size of the original snapshot or succeeding snapshots where lots of blocks have been changed. During the completion process, it will show as ‘in-progress.’

How to create a snapshot from the console

1. Open the console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2. From the navigation pane, choose Snapshots

3. Click on Create Snapshots

4. From the dialog box, choose the volume and then click on Create.

Currently, the EBS snapshot scheduler lets users create schedules on a weekly basis. Meaning, you can schedule the snapshots to be taken on every day of the week or only on specific days. However, right now the schedule does not allow monthly or biweekly intervals. You will need to manually change the tags on Amazon EC2 if you want to stop or change the EBS snapshot scheduler for a short or temporary period.

The user determines the EBS snapshot retention. Meaning, the retention parameters are set by the customer and do not only have to use the default values for the instance. You can also change extra custom tags or elements that allows you to create multiple snapshots schedules.

The feature to automatically delete EBS snapshots is also set for a specific period. The default time for retention is fifteen days. However, users can change this at the configuration, and change retention periods for single instances. Enabling this feature will place a tag on the relevant EBS snapshot that needs to be deleted.

An automated system and process for EBS snapshots will ensure that backups are done on a regular basis. Automation also means you are not dependent on human interaction so the EBS snapshots and backups can be done after hours or during the weekend.