Amazon EC2 - Local backup of EBS AMI

7
votes

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?

2
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ami
The only AMI's you can download are ones you uploaded. If you created an AMI, with an existing public AMI, the software running on it may not be licensed to run outside of ec2. – datasage
@datasage - thanks for your response. Does this mean that the above approach will not work, or is just not advisable? I have seen the topic discussed before, like here weaponshot.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/downloading-an-ami-to-local – marked
@datasage - Do Amazon offer some sort of archived storage for AMIs? Also, do you know if this feature caters specifically for the platforms mentioned? aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport Any info you can offer is great! Many thanks – marked
Instead of trying to archive AMI's you may want to instead look at keeping build scripts to allow a machine to be automatically configured the way you need, whether its on ec2 or not. Look at tools like chef and puppet for this. – datasage
thanks @datasage I will look into those tools, interesting. I found this possible solution, however it is quite old, do you know if this will work with EBS AMIs cloudmess.com/2009/03/11/snapshot-your-ec2-instance-to-s3 Can you bundle EBS images up to s3? Thanks for your patience! – marked

2 Answers

1
votes

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.

0
votes

Not sure that keeping an AMI on premise is a useful strategy: it would only be useful if you could launch a virtual machine out of it outside of AWS. As long as you rely on AWS, you should assume that AMI’s and snapshots are kept safe in S3. You can always copy to another region or even store in another account. Copy backup outside of AWS make sense more for the data (like DB dump or files and folders) and not the entire AMI.