Did this page help you? Yes No Tell us about it...

Deleting an Amazon EBS Snapshot

Topics

This section describes how to delete a snapshot.

	Note
Be aware of the following: If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental so that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally, the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the volume. You cannot delete a snapshot of the root device of an EBS volume used by a registered AMI. You must first de-register the AMI before you can delete the snapshot.

Note

Be aware of the following:

If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental so that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally, the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the volume.
You cannot delete a snapshot of the root device of an EBS volume used by a registered AMI. You must first de-register the AMI before you can delete the snapshot.

AWS Management Console

To delete a snapshot

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Click Snapshots in the Navigation pane.
The console displays a list of current snapshots.
Select a snapshot and click Delete Snapshot.
A confirmation dialog box appears.
Click Yes, Delete.
The snapshot is deleted.

Command Line Tools

To delete a snapshot

Enter the following command.
```
PROMPT>  ec2-delete-snapshot snapshot_id
```
Amazon EC2 returns information similar to the following example.
```
SNAPSHOT snap-78a54011 
```

API

To delete a snapshot

Construct the following Query request.

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=DeleteSnapshot
&SnapshotId=snapshot-id
&...auth parameters...

Following is an example response.

<DeleteSnapshotResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2012-04-01/">
  <requestId>59dbff89-35bd-4eac-99ed-be587EXAMPLE</requestId> 
  <return>true</return>
</DeleteSnapshotResponse>

Document Conventions
Terms of Use

Did this page help you? Yes No Tell us about it...