Amazon EBS Snapshots features

Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) allows you to promptly restore fully provisioned EBS volumes from snapshots. You can enable FSR for public and private snapshots that you own as well as those that are shared with you. The agility and performance benefits of FSR is ideal for scenarios where a central account shares snapshots with you for booting from custom AMIs and restoring volumes for disaster recovery. For more information, see the FSR technical documentation and pricing page.

When you create an encrypted EBS volume and attach it to a supported instance type, all snapshots created from the volume and all volumes created from those snapshots are automatically encrypted. You can also configure your AWS account to enforce the encryption of the new EBS volumes and snapshot copies that you create. For more information, see Amazon EBS Encryption documentation.

Amazon EBS supports the ability to automate the management of snapshots through integration with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager. DLM allows you to define policies that automate the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots taken to back up your block storage assets.

You can use EBS direct APIs for snapshots to read data off snapshots, and identify differences between two EBS snapshots without needing to create EBS volumes and EC2 instances. EBS direct APIs for snapshots also enable backup partners to track incremental changes on EBS volumes more efficiently, providing faster backup times and more granular recovery point objectives (RPOs) to their customers at a lower cost. EBS also provides a set of API calls, that you can use to create EBS snapshots directly from on-premises data and quickly recover into EBS volumes, allowing you to meet your disaster recovery objectives in AWS at lower costs.

Amazon EBS supports the ability to copy snapshots across AWS regions and Availability Zones, making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery. You can copy any snapshot accessible to you, including snapshots created by you, snapshots shared with you, and snapshots from the AWS Marketplace. For more information, see Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot.