I have an EC2 instance with EBS volumes A and B attached to it, and I want to copy/replicate/sync the data from a specific folder in EBS A to EBS B.
EBS A is the primary volume which hosts application installation data and user data, and I'm looking to effectively backup the user data (which is just a specific directory) to EBS B in the event that the application install gets corrupted or needs to be blown away. That way I can simply stand up a new EC2 with a new primary EBS, call it C, attach EBS B to it, and push the user data from EBS B into EBS C.
I am using Amazon Linux 2 and have already gone through the process of formatting and mounting the backup EBS. I can manually copy data from EBS A to EBS B but I was hoping someone could point me towards a best practices for keeping the directory data in sync between the two volumes?
I have found recommendations for rsync, a cron task, and gluster for similar use cases. Would is be considered good practice to use one these for my use case?
While you can use rsync, a better alternative is Data Lifecycle Manager, which will make automated EBS snapshots.
The reason that it's better is that you can specify a fixed number of snapshots, at a fixed time interval, so you don't need to restore the latest (important if the "current" data is corrupted).
To use this most effectively, I would separate the boot volume from the application/data volume(s). So you could just restore the snapshot, spin up a new instance, and mount the restored volume to it.