amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2amazon-glacier

Is there a way to back up an EC2 snapshot to AWS Glacier


Looking for a good and cost effective solution (which are hopefully not mutually-exclusive) for long term archiving of full system backups. I've read many comments that EC2 snapshots cannot be copied to AWS Glacier (snapshots are stored in S3) but I suspect that this simply means there's no "trivial" way to do it. Digging deeper, via scripting or coding or such, is Glacier a feasible mechanism and has anyone worked on it yet?


Solution

  • There is no such feature available and neither it will be available in future.

    Let me explain you why.

    Actually there is no sense in backing up snapshots to glacier,EBS snapshots are incremental, that means every snapshot have a dependency on many other previously created snapshots, it points to data stored in those previously taken snapshots.

    So even if you will find a solution to save the EBS snapshots in glacier it would be hell of a task to retrieve data and restore it to make it usable for backup purpose.

    Glacier is perfect for cost optimization while saving data such as files and retrieving them at later stage in time but with snapshots it doesn't work in the similar way.

    Hope it will help !