Amazon EC2 - Local backup of EBS AMI

Question

I would like to store a local copy of my EBS AMIs for safekeeping/piece of mind, but this does not seem to be very straight-forward.

The only way I have come across is to convert the EBS AMI to instance-store/S3 'format', bundling it and uploading it to S3 as describe in the link, and then downloading it via an s3 browser.

http://www.dowdandassociates.com/content/howto-convert-an-amazon-ec2-ebs-image-to-an-instance-store-image/

Then, when I want to re-upload, I will have to convert back to EBS via something like this: http://www.eaglegenomics.com/2011/05/how-to-convert-s3-instance-store-amis-to-ebs-amis/

I am not entirely sure this method will even work as desired. Is it incorrect, and is there a better alternative? Is it possible to download an AMI from an s3 non 'user-visible' bucket?

Answer 1

Can confirm that this indeed works, if a little inconvenient. Third party tool required to download from non user-visible s3 buckets. s3browser/bucket explorer should do.