- All right, so now let's review a demo
of creating a snapshot of an EBS volume.
From the EC2 dashboards, before we take a look
at our volumes, we can notice here in the summary
that, of course, we have five volumes.
We know that some of those are root volumes
and two of those are volumes that we created for data,
and we currently have no snapshots.
So, let's go to our volumes and again,
here's the 400 gig volume that we added to our Linux machine
and the 100 gig volume that we added to our Windows machine
and so, taking a snapshot is really just a matter of
going here and saying create snapshot.
Now, it is a good idea to quiesce that disk
from the operating system point of view.
So, if you had a database
or some type of an application running
that was performing writes,
then you would probably want to pause those writes,
initiate the snapshot
and then you could continue with your writes.
And so we'll go ahead and say create snapshot
and then we'll call this one, we could use,
we could say data-backup, whatever,
some kind of a description that helps you understand
and of course the date and time that it was created
will already be recorded for you.
You don't necessarily need that in the name.
Again, tags, right, environment, those kinds of things.
And what kind, you might want to add tags
that describe the data that is on here, right.
Does it belong to a particular database
or a particular application,
for a particular team or project or so on?
And then we'll go ahead and say create snapshot
and then of course, whatever data was on that device
at the time we clicked that button,
that's what will be a part of the snapshot.
So if we go back here to that,
now if we go over to snapshots,
you'll see that it's currently pending
and any data that is being written to that volume now
will not be a part of the snapshot.
Only data that was written
at the time we initiate the snapshot
will be included in the snapshot, right.
And of course, there really is no data here,
so it really shouldn't take that long.
And so you can see here the progress
and you can keep an eye out on the status up here
and you can always hit this little button.
You don't need to necessarily refresh
the entire browser window.
Most AWS consoles give you this little refresh button
up here that does a better job of refreshing the console.
So, there you go, the snapshot is now completed.
Progress 100% and, of course,
we hadn't written any data to it,
but if in a real world scenario,
if we had written data to that, then from here,
we could say, well, let's create a volume,
and by creating a volume in this way, from the snapshots,
then that will create a volume from that snapshot.
All of the data on that snapshot will then be available
on the EBS volume that was created from it.
And again, just as a reminder, this snapshot now,
whatever data is a part of this snapshot,
we know is stored in S3.
We don't necessarily have access directly
to that area of S3 storage, but we do know that the data,
all of the data that was a part of this particular snapshot
is stored in S3, so we gain a much higher degree
of durability in that data.
And so, pretty simple, right?
Not a whole lot to do other than select your volume
and create a snapshot.