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Parth
Parth

Reputation: 21

AWS EC2 instance snapshot in another region

i m running ec2 instance in 1 region i want to create snapshots of ec2 instances in other region directly without coping and cross region replication in s3, is this possible? if possible then how?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1764

Answers (1)

John Rotenstein
John Rotenstein

Reputation: 269282

Amazon EBS Snapshots are created in the same region as the original EBS Volume. They can then be used to create a new Volume within the same Region.

If you wish to use an Amazon EBS Snapshot in a different region, the snapshot must first be copied to the other Region. This can done via the Amazon EC2 management console, the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI) aws ec2 copy-snapshot command, or an AWS API call.

Please note that snapshots are incremental backups. The first snapshot isn't really a full backup. Rather, every snapshot simply copies any blocks that have been modified since any previous snapshot. Blocks are retained while snapshots still require the blocks. This means that blocks made during the initial snapshot could actually be deleted if they are not required by any active snapshots. This is why I say they are not the same as a full backup, which traditionally never has content deleted.

However, when a snapshot is copied to a new region it is copied in full, rather than incrementally.

If you do not with to copy an EBS snapshot between regions, you would need to find a different way to transfer the disk volume (eg filesystem-level synchronisation).

In fact, there should typically be no need to transfer a disk volume -- rather, your systems should be capable of configuring a new server based upon a startup configuration script and data should be stored in a separate database so that it is accessible to multiple instances. It is a very rare case that requires a complete copy of a disk volume.

Upvotes: 2

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