Automate EC2 volume snapshots. Inspired by ec2-automate-backup but with the following differences:

• doesn't depend on AWS cli tools
• timestamps stored in human readable form
• name and description tags include volume's friendly name, for easy identification

Setup an EC2 instance with an appropriate IAM role to allow snapshots to be created/deleted.

$ ./auto-snapshot --help
Usage of ./auto-snapshot:
  -k int
    	Purge snapshot after this many days. Zero value means never purge
  -p	Enable purging of snapshots (default true)
  -region string
    	AWS region to use
  -tagPrefix string
    	String to prefix to tag name, description (default "auto-snap")
  -tags value
    	Select EBS volumes using these tag keys e.g. 'Daily-Backup'. Tag values should be == 'true'

Typical usage:

Tag each EBS volume that you would like to include in the automatic snapshot with a unique tag key e.g. Backup-Daily and set the tag's value to true. Run auto-snapshot and specify the tag key that you used, together with the number of days snapshots should be kept. Here are some example crontab entries:

# Auto-snapshot: run every day, and create a snapshot that lasts 4 days
# (this is intended to cover long weekends)
0 0 * * * 	/home/backup/auto-snapshot -region="ap-southeast-2" -tags="Backup-Daily" -k=4

# Run on 1st month, and create a snapshot that lasts 60 days
# at any given time, we should have a snapshot *at least* 1 month old
0 0 1 * * 	/home/backup/auto-snapshot -region="ap-southeast-2" -tags="Backup-Monthly" -k=60

Get a precompiled binary for Linux or compile from source using Go build tools. Compilation requires the dep vendoring utility.

go get -d github.com/porjo/auto-snapshot
cd $GOPATH/github.com/porjo/auto-snapshot
dep ensure
go build
./auto-snapshot