- Now let's review a demo
of creating a snapshot within Amazon EBS.
From the AWS console dashboard,
I'm gonna go back to EC2.
I'm gonna go back to my list of volumes.
Can see we have several data volumes here.
So from this volume, it could be a 100 gig volume,
but perhaps we only have 10 gigs of storage on it.
Doesn't really matter.
One thing that we should keep in mind
is that if we are making regular snapshots
of our volumes for the sake of durability,
for the sake of backing up that data,
we should take these snapshots
with no more than 20 gigs of dirty data,
meaning that if we wait too long
and enough data has changed so that the snapshot
causes 20 gigs of data to be backed up,
then we can see a performance hit
while the snapshot is in place.
So creating a snapshot is really easy.
We just highlight the volume that we want to snapshot.
Go to Actions, and Create Snapshot.
From here, I might put the date or
I'm just gonna call this one AWS
livelessons
backup.
And we also need a description.
A lot of times, I just use the name over again.
And then once we have the name in the description,
we can hit Create, and the snapshot creation has started.
So that means that this volume
is in the process of creating a snapshot.
So if we go over here to the snapshots,
we can see that this one has already completed.
That's because we don't really have
a whole lot of data on there, didn't take very long.
But if we had this volume with upwards of 20 gigs or more
worth of data, then it would've taken a bit longer
for that snapshot to complete.
So this is just one way to create a snapshot
here through the console.
The other ways would be to leverage the command line tools
or the Amazon SDK and do it programatically.
So it's a very common practice
to write scripts that leverage those tools
that automatically do these backups
at a prescribed period of time.
So now that we have our snapshot,
from here we could do a number of things.
We could Copy that snapshot
to another region if we wanted to.
You can see here it's in Ohio,
but we might want to copy that to some other region,
any other region around the globe
and give some geographical diversity to our data
if we wanted to.
We could also create a volume.
You can see here,
we can recreate another EBS volume from that snapshot
and put that volume in another availability zone.
Or the same availability zone.
That's up to us depending on whatever it is
that we're trying to achieve.
So that is creating snapshots
from existing EBS volumes
in Amazon EC2.