Posted On: Dec 19, 2022

With the general availability of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots Archive in AWS Middle East (UAE), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Regions, customers in these regions can 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.  

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.

This capability is now available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console in AWS Middle East (UAE), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Regions. With this launch, Snapshots Archive is now available in all AWS commercial regions and AWS GovCloud(US) regions.