I have several Amazon AWS EC2 virtual machines that I created on AWS EC2. They were not imported, they were created there. I would like to export these machines in order to achieve local backups, and a local testing environment.
I have looked a lot of places, and found tons of information that says you can only export a VM from EC2 if you imported into EC2 originally. I have also found information that says you can only import into EC2 if the machine was originally exported from EC2.
My question is, is it possible to export a VM that was built on EC2, and somehow get it locally. I have read that you have to back it up to an S3 Bucket, and then download it, but Amazon's documentation says that you can only export it from there if it was originally imported.
Here are the links on serverfault that I found this question asked, but not answered.