Posted On: Oct 24, 2022
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots Archive helps customers save up to 75% on storage costs for Amazon EBS Snapshots that they rarely access and intend to retain for more than 90 days. Amazon EBS Snapshots are incremental in nature, storing only the changes since the last snapshot. This makes them cost-effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently. If you have snapshots that you access every few months or years, and would like to retain them long-term for legal or compliance reasons, you can use Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a lower cost than what you would incur if stored in the standard tier. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to create snapshots and automatically move them to EBS Snapshots Archive based on your specific policies, further reducing the need to manage complex custom scripts and the risk of having unattended storage costs.
Snapshots in the Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive tier have a minimum retention period of 90 days. When you archive a snapshot, a full snapshot archive is created that contains all the data needed to create your Amazon EBS Volume. To create a volume from the snapshot archive, you can restore the snapshot archive to the standard tier, and then create an Amazon EBS volume from the snapshot in the same way you do today. You can now automate the creation and moving snapshots to archive tier with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager polices at no additional cost. After a period of time that you specify, any policies with Snapshots Archive enabled will automatically move the snapshots to the archive tier. Finally, Data Lifecycle Manager will automatically delete the snapshots at the end of its retention.
This capability is available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, see the technical documentation on EBS Snapshots Archive and the blog and associated technical documentation on automating EBS Snapshots Archive with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.