Command line tool for creating Amazon EBS snapshots for volumes in one or more EC2 regions and automatically removing older snapshots.

Download a binary from the releases area or build locally (see below).

Snapshot every volume in the same region as the host machine, keeping last 7 snapshots (default) for each volume. Region is inferred using EC2 metadata:

ebs_snapshotter

Snapshot every volume in the same region as the host machine, keeping last 5 snapshots for each volume:

ebs_snapshotter -retain=5

You can also specify regions explicitly if the host machine needs to snapshot volumes in multiple region(s):

ebs_snapshotter -regions=us-east-1,us-west-2 -retain=5

Generating an SNS alert for each region after completion:

ebs_snapshotter -regions=us-east-1,us-west-2 -sns_topic="arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:123456789:BackupAlerts"

Overriding SNS alert details with your own values:

ebs_snapshotter -regions=us-east-1 -sns_topic="arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:123456789:BackupAlerts" -sns_subject="Snapshots Process" -sns_message="us-east-1 complete"

Run ebs_snapshotter -h to view all options.

To disable this behavior, set -copytags=false.

If -regions or -snsRegion are omitted, this tool will use the host machine's EC2 metadata to populate these values. Thus, if running this tool from a non-EC2 machine, be sure you set these values.

This tool can be installed directly on an EC2 instance and scheduled via cron. An alternate approach is to use AWS Lambda, see this post.

Backup at 1 AM nightly:

0 1 * * * /bin/ebs_snapshotter -regions=us-east-1 -retain=5 -sns_topic="arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:123456789:BackupAlerts" > /var/log/cron.log

A sample Dockerfile is included in this repo for reference. Or use the existing image:

docker pull healthcareblocks/ebs_snapshotter

The binary is used as the entrypoint, so you can pass options directly:

Example:

docker run --rm healthcareblocks/ebs_snapshotter -retain=5

The host machine should be configured for AWS access either via an IAM role or a user with AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY set in the environment.

• ec2:CopySnapshot
• ec2:CreateSnapshot
• ec2:CreateTags
• ec2:DeleteSnapshot
• ec2:DeleteTags
• ec2:DescribeSnapshotAttribute
• ec2:DescribeSnapshots
• ec2:DescribeTags
• ec2:DescribeVolumes
• ec2:ModifySnapshotAttribute
• ec2:ResetSnapshotAttribute
• SNS:Publish [optional - applicable if sending SNS messages]

Builds are generated by a Docker image and output to a bin directory, see makefile.

Dependencies are managed via https://github.com/golang/dep