EC2 Backup Strategies

Many backup and recovery tools provided from AWS

EC2 does not backup data by default.
Automating the process to run at regular, predetermined intervals is essential.
Many strategies available, decide amongst
- Snapshots Vs. AMI
- In-House Scripting Vs. Third-Party EC2 Backup Solution

EBS Snapshots

Create snapshots if EC2 instances are stored via EBS.
method use Amazon S3, which is natively API-based
Snapshots are backups of Amazon EBS volumes redundantly stored by Amazon S3.
At first, an exact copy of volume is created.
Subsequent snapshots will only capture incremental block-level changes of original.
Hence, quick, efficient means for backing up and restoring data.
Snapshot copies can be copied to other AWS region, for disaster recovery.
Extra copy in another region, can prevent complete data loss during a failure.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

AMI provides information required to launch an EC2 instance.
Specify an AMI during launching an instance
Launch as many instances from AMI per requirement
method use Amazon S3, which is natively API-based
AMI is an encrypted machine image
Contains all information necessary to restore data,
Also has a template for root volume for instance
Template has details on
- the operating system
- application server
- applications
- launch permissions, etc.
instance store-based AMIs against EBS, are
- slower
- less flexible
- more costly

In-House Scripting

User can leverage existing scripts being used in organization
AWS provides option to process and automate backup process using their in-house scripting.
Helps in automating the backup process.
can also prove to be expensive and time-consuming
can become a laborious and time-consuming process if scaling up data.

Third-Party EC2 Backup Solutions