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We have a cloud server on Amazon EC2. Our old admin setup the DNS and Mail Server on one server that is working fine but I just realized now that the instance is on Instance store not an EBS backed. So the hardware could be failed any time and we will loose all our emails etc.

So I want to migrate that instance from Instance Store to EBS Backed instance, also I want to split the DNS from Mail(Zimbra Server) before the migration so our other sites should not effect with this migration.

I need some solution, how to migrate from Instance store to EBS instance with less down time.

Toqeer
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  • Remember, EBS goes down too. http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ "As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume." – ceejayoz Aug 27 '12 at 15:14
  • Okay that is nice info I was not aware of but we can take snapshot of the EBS backed instance while we could not take snapshot of Instance store volumes. I think these on S3. – Toqeer Aug 27 '12 at 15:44
  • You need to unmount the volume or shutdown the instance to make a non-corrupt snapshot. This is because EBS snapshots are block level snapshots. Another option is a 2nd EBS volume to make backups to. You can unmount and detach the extra volume and do snapshots of it. Personally, I would rather rsync my data to another region. – Skaperen Aug 30 '12 at 02:13

1 Answers1

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Here is a post on stackoverflow that shows how to migrate your running instance to an EBS backed AMI.

If you go this way, I would strongly suggest to test this on a throw-away instance first.

Another option would be to create a new EBS volume, mount it to your existing instance and move your mail folder onto the EBS volume. After this you can symlink the new folder into its original location. You now have your mails on an EBS volume with all its benefits like snapshots etc. Then you can start to set up your new server with a new EBS-backed AMI and simply attach this volume to your server, keeping all your mails.

Community
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j0nes
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