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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 Developer Guide or 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.
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.
ec2-create-snapshot
volume_id [-d
description]
| Name | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
|
|
The ID of the Amazon EBS volume of which to take a snapshot. Type: String Default: None Example: vol-4d826724 |
Yes |
|
|
Description of the Amazon EBS snapshot. Type: String Default: None Constraints: Up to 255 characters Example: Daily backup |
No |
The command returns a table that contains the following information:
SNAPSHOT identifier
ID of the snapshot
ID of the volume
Snapshot state (e.g., pending, completed, error)
Time stamp when snapshot initiated
ID of the owner
Size of the volume
Description
Amazon EC2 displays errors on stderr.
This example creates a snapshot of volume vol-4d826724.
PROMPT>ec2-create-snapshot vol-4d826724 --description "Daily Backup"SNAPSHOT snap-c070c5a9 vol-9539dcfc pending 2009-09-16T14:31:29+0000 218213537122 1 Daily Backup
