Comments on: Automating snapshots of EC2 EBS volumes

By: Ben Bridts

Ben Bridts — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 08:19:44 +0000

In reply to Prashant.

Hi Prashant,

Which link did you follow? If you look at the Readme of https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools/tree/master/ec2-automate-backup? This uses the new version with python and the aws-cli.

By: Prashant

Prashant — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 07:21:33 +0000

I am unable to backup EC2 EBS volumes.i have gone through above link

By: Stephan

Stephan — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:07:31 +0000

For those who are not familiar with with scripts I have written an easy to use windows tool that allows you to schedule starts/stops/backups of EC2 and RDS instances:
http://www.automaticloud.net

By: Ben Bridts

Ben Bridts — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 19:03:40 +0000

Hi Trent,

The snapshots are indeed not guaranteed to be consistent. They will only contain the data that’s written to disk. If you require consistency when creating snapshots (eg. for your database servers), have a look at https://github.com/alestic/ec2-consistent-snapshot . The setup is more complex though.

Recently we stopped using this script, and started using Ansible to create snapshots. You can read more about that here: https://cloudar.be/awsblog/instance-and-snapshot-management-with-ansible/ . The Ansible modules do not support consistent snapshots at the moment, but it’s definitely something we want to implement in the future.

By: trent

trent — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:41:28 +0000

No unmounting or freezing of the filesystem as AWS recommends? The script unfortunately isn’t that useful to run centrally since it can’t go freeze all the filesystems while the snapshot runs.

By: Wes

Wes — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 19:41:10 +0000

Hi Roger,

I finally got it working, however, I would like the name of all my instances to be included, in the snapshot, as volume-id is less desirable. how would I modify the code to do this?

By: Roger

Roger — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:25:04 +0000

Thanks for your contribution! It works perfect!
I just had to change the tag -t ‘Backup=true’ by tag -t ‘Backup,Values=true’ . Otherwise describe-volumes didn’t detect my volumes with tag Backup on true.

By: Bart Van Hecke

Bart Van Hecke — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 08:11:59 +0000

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the suggestion!
We’ll give it a try…

Cheers,

Bart

By: Colin Johnson

Colin Johnson — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 06:06:41 +0000

Saw your writeup on ec2-automate-backup (I’m the author) – you might try the aws-cli (https://github.com/colinbjohnson/aws-missing-tools/blob/master/ec2-automate-backup/ec2-automate-backup-awscli.sh) version instead, which does away with the requirement for the Java install, instead relying on Amazon’s python based aws-cli (http://aws.amazon.com/cli/).