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How correctly and cost effective to store EC2 instance backups?

I have a scenario like:

  • Create EC2-instance snapshot.
  • Move it to S3 bucket.
  • Move it from S3 bucket to Glacier
  • Done

It is correctly solution or I can do it somehow with Storage Gateway? PS. All our infrastructure is located in Amazon

Thanks for advices.

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  • Depending on your change rate I would keep one snapshot for fast recovery. Besides that doing a backup which can de-duplicate over multiple backups might be cost-optimal if you need that kind of history.
    – eckes
    May 17, 2017 at 9:01

3 Answers 3

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With regards to 3-2-1 rule and recent ransomware attacks, it is beneficial to go VTL backups. This kind of data is (still) resilient to ransomware. VTL Gateway being implemented in the cloud is cost efficient as well. You pay for AMI running gateway only for uptime.

In case you already have a backup software running tape jobs it would look like:

  • Boot VTL Gateway
  • Create EC2-instance full backup
  • Write backup to VTL tape (rotating tapes according to backup plan)
  • Shutdown VTL Gateway until next backup job.
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    You can't use an EBS snapshot, as you can't access them directly. What kind of snapshot would you use?
    – Tim
    May 17, 2017 at 18:48
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    1. Snapshots are not backups. Never have been, never will be. These guys thought that EBS snapshots were backups as well theregister.co.uk/2014/06/18/code_spaces_destroyed 2. Snapshots in AWS are taken at the storage level EBS only. For your setup of EC2 cloud, I would consider backup files.
    – Mr. Raspberry
    May 19, 2017 at 15:03
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EBS snapshots of EC2 instances are in a part of S3 you can't access. You can't back up EC2 instances to Glacier via EC2 snapshots.

You can of course copy your data anywhere you like. You might be able to find a way to take an image of the entire instance some way other than EC2 snapshots and store that in Glacier, but I'm not sure how you'd restore it. It's probably possible though.

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  • And which will be the best cost effective solution to store snapshot., We don't have another solution to do it, only standard snapshots?
    – Vladlen Gladis
    May 17, 2017 at 9:08
  • @GVArt there are many possible solutions involving varying levels of complexity and outside-the-box thinking, but there's only one native solution. EBS snapshots are automatically deduplicated, so if (e.g.) you store two that are almost identical, the second one costs nearly nothing. What is the problem you're trying to solve?
    – Michael - sqlbot
    May 17, 2017 at 11:40
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What about using a third-party backup software e.g.Cloudberry that can help in your situation? The tool has both free and paid versionings and it can do all the work for you? Have you thought about it?

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