Amazon EC2 EBS backup: AMI vs Snapshot

Question

I am trying to create a backup mechanism for our server, so that if my system crashes, I should be able to create the whole system by running a single script

After going through Amazon documentation, this is my understanding of creating a backup and restoring

Backup

1. Create a AMI Image (this can be updated monthly)
2. Create a snapshot (This can be done using a daily script creating a snapshot)

Restore (A script to)

1. Create an EBS instance using AMI
2. Attach the EBS volume to Instance created

Now my Questions is

1. Is it the best way to take a backup and restore?
2. Do we actually need to backup 2 things, AMI and EBS volume (using snapshot), Can we just keep snapshots?
3. I understand this cannot work for a local instance store instance, as there is no snapshot functionality. So how can I create a backup and restore process for local instance store instances?

Answer 1

As I could not find any better alternative, I am sticking with the initial approach.

For EBS

Backup:

• Create a AMI Image (this can be updated monthly).
• Create a snapshot (This can be done using a daily script creating a snapshot).

Restore (A script to)

• Create an EBS instance using AMI.
• Attach the EBS volume to Instance created.

For instance store, I am only keeping the application (no database), so no need to keep a backup of that.

Answer 2

EBS Snapshots are an excellent way to create backups.

You can perform frequent Snapshots of your EBS Volumes via scripts. Weekly, Daily, Hourly, or as frequently as your Credit Card will allow. The only limit is around how many simultaneous snapshots you can be doing - when you hit that, the EBS API will start giving back errors until a few of the in-flight operations complete.

Snapshots can also be copied from Region to Region in order to provide backup against a catastrophic event.

When you snapshot an EBS volume, that snapshot is of the entire volume. Even if it was created from an AMI, your snapshot contains everything you need to create a new instance of the volume. You can pretty easily try this yourself.