How to Backup and Restore AWS EC2 Instance using EC2 Snapshots

AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides various mechanisms for backup and restore to help you protect your EC2 instances and data from data loss and disasters. In this tutorial we will look into taking backup of an EC2 instance root volume using EC2 snapshots and restoring it back on to the same instance. A root volume in a Linux EC2 instance is the disk that holds the Operating System.

What are EC2 Snapshots?

EC2 Snapshots are point-in-time backups of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes attached to EC2 instances. Snapshots are incremental backups which means only the changes made since the last snapshot are backed up the next time, which makes them cost-effective and efficient. You can utilize snapshots to create new volumes or restore volumes to a previous state. These snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, ensuring high durability.

How EBS Snapshots Work

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots are block-level backups that capture the state of an EBS volume at a specific point in time. When you create a snapshot, it captures only the blocks that have changed since the last snapshot, making the process efficient and cost-effective. These snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, ensuring high durability.

However, it’s important to note that EBS snapshots are crash-consistent, not application-consistent, meaning they do not save data blocks written after the snapshot initiation if the instance is running. Despite their benefits, EBS snapshots have some limitations, such as lack of scheduling and retention options, inability to create on-premises copies, and the complexity of creating application-consistent snapshots for simplified recovery.

Read this article to know more…