Currently we have a windows 2008 server running a Mongo database hosted on Amazon EC2. Without looking at database replication to another database what can we do to make sure the database is getting backed and that the database stays up at an application level.
At the moment the database is the C drive I was reading that maybe it would be better to create a EBS volume and run the database from there. Could I then use EBS snapshots to make sure that database was getting backed up to amazon S3 ?
Mongo has a very thorough page on this: EC2 Backup & Restore.
You could indeed use EBS snapshot to do this, but it would require a bit more work then what you are describing in your question. I think it would be best to backup both the database and the journal file.
The journal file allows for roll forward recovery. The journal files are located in the dbpath directory so will be snapshotted at the same time as the database files.
If the dbpath is mapped to a single EBS volume then proceed to the Backup the Database Files section.
If you dbpath is mapped to multiple EBS volumes, in order to guarantee the stability of the file-system then you will need to Flush and Lock the Database section.