CreateSnapshot

Description

Creates a snapshot of an Amazon EBS volume and stores it in Amazon S3. You can use snapshots for backups, to make identical copies of instance devices, and to save data before shutting down an instance. For more information about Amazon EBS, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

When taking a snapshot of a file system, we recommend unmounting it first. This ensures the file system metadata is in a consistent state, that the 'mounted indicator' is cleared, and that all applications using that file system are stopped and in a consistent state. Some file systems, such as xfs, can freeze and unfreeze activity so a snapshot can be made without unmounting.

For Linux/UNIX, enter the following command from the command line to unmount the volume.

umount -d device_name

For example:

umount -d /dev/sdh

For Windows, open Disk Management, right-click the volume to unmount, and select Change Drive Letter and Path. Then, select the mount point to remove and click Remove.

Request Parameters

Name Description Required

Name	Description	Required
`VolumeId`	The ID of the Amazon EBS volume of which to take a snapshot. Type: String Default: None	Yes
`Description`	Description of the Amazon EBS snapshot. Type: String Default: None Constraints: Up to 255 characters	No

VolumeId

The ID of the Amazon EBS volume of which to take a snapshot.

Type: String

Default: None

Yes

Description

Description of the Amazon EBS snapshot.

Type: String

Default: None

Constraints: Up to 255 characters

No

Response Elements

The elements in the following table come wrapped in a CreateSnapshotResponse structure.

Name	Description
`requestId`	The ID of the request. Type: xsd:string
`snapshotId`	The ID of the snapshot. Type: xsd:string
`volumeId`	The ID of the volume. Type: xsd:string
`status`	Snapshot state Type: xsd:string Valid Values: `pending` \| `completed` \| `error`
`startTime`	Time stamp when the snapshot was initiated. Type: xsd:dateTime
`progress`	The progress of the snapshot, in percentage. Type: xsd:string
`ownerId`	The AWS account ID of the Amazon EBS snapshot owner. Type: xsd:string
`volumeSize`	The size of the volume, in GiB. Type: xsd:string
`description`	Description of the snapshot. Type: xsd:string

Examples

Example Request

This example creates a snapshot of volume vol-4d826724.

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/?Action=CreateSnapshot
&VolumeId=vol-4d826724
&Description=Daily+Backup
&AuthParams

Example Response

<CreateSnapshotResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-08-31/">
  <requestId>59dbff89-35bd-4eac-99ed-be587EXAMPLE</requestId>
  <snapshotId>snap-78a54011</snapshotId>
  <volumeId>vol-4d826724</volumeId>
  <status>pending</status>
  <startTime>2008-05-07T12:51:50.000Z</startTime>
  <progress>60%</progress>
  <ownerId>213457642086</ownerId>
  <volumeSize>10</volumeSize>
  <description>Daily Backup</description>
</CreateSnapshotResponse>