Do I need to back up AWS EBS data?

Question

I am running a web application on an AWS EC2 instance that uses EBS storage as its local drive. The web application runs on the Apache / Tomcat server, processes downloaded files in local storage and uses the MySQL database, all on this local drive. Does AWS ensure EBS data integrity and availability or should I support it before S3? If so, how do I do this? I need to have daily incremental backups (i.e. I can allow myself to free recent transactions / files made today). Note. I'm not worried about human errors (accidental bumps, etc.), but rather about system crashes, service failures, etc. Thanks..

Answer 1

Amazon does not guarantee the integrity of your EBS volumes, but they are very easy to back up. Just take a daily snapshot (you can configure cron with ec2-api-tools for a daily snapshot).

EBS snapshots are stored in S3. They are not in your own bucket and the parts are handled by Amazon, but the infrastructure in which the pictures are stored is S3.

Snapshots are incremental and back up the entire volume. Each snapshot saves changes to the device since the last snapshot, so they are often reduced by how much time they take, but you can only have a limited number of snapshots at once to your AWS account. I think it's 250. Ultimately, you need to delete your old snapshots to handle this. You can also do this with the cron job. Deleting old snapshots does not invalidate new snapshots, even if they are stored as incremental ones, because it will actually update the next newest snapshot to contain information from the previous snapshot when deleting.