EBS Snapshot Cost Calculator
Amazon EBS snapshots are an AWS-native backup mechanism for your EBS volumes.
If you are coming from a traditional backup history, they can be considered a mix of full and incremental backups:
- The first EBS snapshot created will be a full backup,
- All subsequent EBS snapshots created will be incremental
However, unlike traditional backups, if you delete the first EBS snapshot (the “full one”), the rest of the EBS snapshots are still fully recoverable. It is 100% safe to delete any EBS snapshot; all remaining EBS snapshots are fully recoverable.
EBS snapshots are an important tool in any disaster recovery strategy. For many, creating daily EBS snapshots, automatically, is an important event.
Since EBS snapshots are incremental, pre-calculating the cost of EBS snapshots is difficult. The reason is that there are many factors that can affect the actual cost of an EBS snapshot:
- The amount of data that has changed since the last EBS snapshot,
- How compressible the data is (since AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3).
We have created an EBS Snapshot Pricing Calculator to help estimate the cost of creating daily EBS snapshots.
Using the calculator, you simply enter your EBS volume size and expected percentage of daily changes. 3% is a good expected change to start with. After that, you’ll be shown the storage required for 30 days of daily EBS snapshots.
Next, select the region of your EBS snapshots, and the cost of the EBS snapshots will be calculated.
The calculator is free to use for everyone. Hopefully you’ll find it useful in your cost estimations.
More Information
More information about EBS snapshots can be found on the Amazon EBS Snapshots pages.
About Skeddly
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- Reduce your AWS costs,
- Schedule snapshots and images, and
- Automate many DevOps and IT tasks.
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