When is it safe to delete an EBS volume?

2
votes

I have a bunch of EBS volumes that appear to be unused, but I'm not sure how to confirm it's safe to delete them.

  • Is a volume having State: "available" and Attachments: [] (empty list) synonymous?
  • Are AMIs or EC2 snapshots ever stored as EBS volumes?
    • Generally speaking, does AWS use volumes for anything besides attaching them to EC2 instances?
2
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2
Available, no attachment means it isn't attached to any EC2 server. I'm not sure what you mean by EC2 snapshots "using" EBS volumes. That's not true. An EC2 snapshot is just a snapshot/backup of an EBS volume. The snapshot would have no reason to exist if it depended on the EBS volume. – Mark B

2 Answers

0
votes

I think that this is a very broad question in the sense that the term "safe" can be very loosely defined. In general, I would say if your volume is not attached to an instance, and you have a recent snapshot of the volume, then it should be safe to delete.

0
votes

If you have a snapshot and you don't have an instance attached to the volume, you can safely remove the volumes. Volumes can be recreated from snapshots.

Here is a good explanation:

https://help.skeddly.com/en/articles/1295444-the-difference-between-ebs-snapshots-and-ami-images#:~:text=An%20EBS%20snapshot%20is%20a%20backup%20of%20a%20single%20EBS%20volume.&text=An%20AMI%20image%20is%20a,the%20AMI%20image%20was%20created.