Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Snapshots

Question 1

Can I stripe multiple volumes together to get better performance?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 1

Yes. You can stripe multiple volumes together to achieve up to 75,000 IOPS or 1,750 MiB/s when attached to larger EC2 instances. However, performance for st1 and sc1 scales linearly with volume size so there may not be as much of a benefit to stripe these volumes together.

Question 2

Will I be able to access my snapshots using the regular Amazon S3 API?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 2

No, snapshots are only available through the Amazon EC2 API.

Question 3

Do volumes need to be un-mounted to take a snapshot?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 3

No, snapshots can be done in real time while the volume is attached and in use. However, snapshots only capture data that has been written to your Amazon EBS volume, which might exclude any data that has been locally cached by your application or OS. To ensure consistent snapshots on volumes attached to an instance, we recommend detaching the volume cleanly, issuing the snapshot command, and then reattaching the volume. For Amazon EBS volumes that serve as root devices, we recommend shutting down the machine to take a clean snapshot.

Question 4

Does it take longer to snapshot an entire 16 TB volume as compared to an entire 1 TB volume?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 4

By design, an EBS Snapshot of an entire 16 TB volume should take no longer than the time it takes to snapshot an entire 1 TB volume. However, the actual time taken to create a snapshot depends on several factors including the amount of data that has changed since the last snapshot of the EBS volume.

Question 5

Are snapshots versioned? Can I read an older snapshot to do a point-in-time recovery?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 5

Each snapshot is given a unique identifier, and customers can create volumes based on any of their existing snapshots.

Question 6

How can I discover Amazon EBS snapshots that are shared with me?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 6

You can find snapshots that are shared with you by selecting Private Snapshots from the list in the Snapshots section of the AWS Management Console. This section lists both snapshots that you own and snapshots that are shared with you.

Question 7

How can I find which Amazon EBS snapshots are shared globally?

Snapshots

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 7

You can find snapshots that are shared globally by selecting Public Snapshots from the list in the Snapshots section of the AWS Management Console.