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I am new to AWS, we have few AWS EC2 instances. I was wondering what is the best and most cost effective way to take backups. I read the recommended article about EBS snapshots, but it seemed to be very expensive if the server counts go high.

I am wondering what is the standard practice used by others.

Tim
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JJK
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Snapshots are the standard way to back up EC2 instances. They're incremental, so if you take two snapshots the second stores only blocks that have changed. You can't copy Snapshots outside AWS. Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB of storage per month, so a 20GB system disk would cost $1 per month - probably less since it's probably not full. I don't know any other way to backup your operating system instances.

If you want to back up your data you can do what I do. I use Attic backup to do an incremental, deduplicated backup, then I use Dropbox Uploader to sync those up to Dropbox each night. I guess you could back up your operating system files like that, but it would probably be quite difficult to get it to boot. If you can find another way to take an OS image you could sync that to dropbox as well.

Another way to do things is to consider immutable servers. You have a "recipe" that creates the server and sets up all required software, then pull any required data down from S3. This tends to make for a more robust infrastructure. CloudFormation or Opsworks are good technologies for this.

Tim
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  • Thank you, most of the backup solution I checked was all based around snapshot, which uses EBS and S3. So cost is roughly the same as EC2. I appreciate your feedback, I will definitely checkout attic. Looks like very good. – JJK Sep 25 '16 at 00:24
  • Snapshots are stored only on S3, in a part of S3 you can't access directly. EBS is the source for snapshots only. – Tim Sep 25 '16 at 00:49