Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) offers persistent storage for the Amazon EC2 instances through the EBS volumes. Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of the volumes, which are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones.  The above mentioned snapshots can be used to create new Amazon EBS volumes, which will have all the available data snapped during the point-in snapshots. This helps in the protection of the data for long term durability as the snapshot is stored in the highly durable S3.

The present guide demonstrates how to create a volume from a snapshot.

1. Go to the AWS console through the URL http://aws.amazon.com/console. Select the EC2 service. From the EC2 dashboard, select EBS Snapshots or Snapshots.

2. The snapshot dashboard lists all the snapshots owned by the user in that region. Select a snapshot from which the user wants to create the volume. Click on the “Create Volume” button.

3. Select the volume type, size of the volume, IOPS (if volume type is Provisioned IO), and the availability zone. The snapshot ID will automatically be selected based on the snapshot selected in step#2. For more information about creating a volume, refer here. Click on the “Yes, Create” button.

4. The new volume from the snapshot will be created and be in an available state as it is not attached to any instance.

5. To run the above mentioned steps through the command line interface, first setup AWS EC2 CLI to launch an instance with the command line option, as explained here.

6. Run the following command to list all the snapshots in that region, which are owned by the user:

ec2-describe-snapshots -- region <region name>  -o self

Run the below mentioned command to create the volume:

ec2-create-volume --region <region name> --availability-zone <Zone in which volume will be created>  --size <size in GB> -t<io1 if Provisioned IOPS> -i <IOPS> --snapshot <Snapshot ID from which volume will be created>

7. The actual output is shown below:

[Newvem analytics tracks you AWS cloud utilization:

• Hourly Utilization Pattern Analysis 
• Reserved Instances Decision Tool 
• Resource Resizing Opportunities

Get Started For Free or Learn More]

Keywords: EBS, EBS Volume, EBS support, EBS snapshot, Amazon EBS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, Amazon AWS Cloud services, AMI, Amazon Machine Image, DR, Backup, AWS Instance, AWS Console