Posted On: Dec 17, 2012

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of a new feature Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshot Copy. EBS Snapshot Copy enables you to copy your EBS snapshots across AWS regions, thus making it easier for you to leverage multiple AWS regions and accelerate your geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.

EBS Snapshot Copy is simple to use. In the AWS Management Console, you can select the snapshot to be copied, set the destination region, and start the copy. This feature can also be accessed via an EC2 Command Line Interface or an EC2 API as described in the EBS Snapshot Copy page. The copied snapshot behaves the same as other snapshots in the destination region: it can be used to create new EBS volumes which can then be attached to an EC2 instance in the destination region.

You will be charged only for the data transferred to copy the snapshot and to store the copied snapshot at the destination region.

We also plan to launch Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy as a follow-up to this feature, which will enable you to copy both public and custom-created AMIs across regions.

You can learn more about EBS and this feature by visiting the Amazon EBS Documentation.