EC2 - taking an EBS snapshot, saving to S3, and then launching instances from S3

Question

I like the convenience of taking an AMI snapshot - but ideally I do no want to pay for the volume to be attached to my running instance.

Is there a way to save a snapshot instance to S3 and then launch from S3 without attaching a volume to the running instance - gaining the convenience of snapshots - without the running costs?

Answer 1

EBS snapshots are already persisted to S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/)
from ebs docs:

Amazon EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are persisted to Amazon S3. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as you wish

and AMIs are also stored in S3.

Answer 2

It's true that with an EBS volume you are paying for the allocated space, even if you are just using a fraction of it for data.

If you are just looking to store the data, you can use any tool to "backup" the data to S3 directly, then restore it to a volume when you need to. S3sync works well for this, so does creating a tarball.