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I have an AWS ec2 ubuntu 18.04 t2.medium account and I no longer need the resources, so I'd like to transfer my instance to an t2.micro account. It originally was an t2.micro account that i moved up to t2.medium.

My question is, I have sensitive data on the instance. I believe it started with 30GB. Will this data be compromised if i do the transfer and are there any other implications that I should be aware of by doing this transfer.

somejkuser
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1 Answers1

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T2 instances don’t have instance storage (aka ephemeral storage) so presumably all your data are on EBS volumes. That makes it easy - you can simply Stop the instance (do not Terminate it!!) and Change the instance type to t2.micro.

At this point I would also Create an Image from the instance - it will act as your backup image (AMI) in case you ever need to restore it.

Then you can Start the instance again. However you said that you don’t need it at the moment - you can leave it in Stopped state for as long as you want and not pay for any compute time at all and only pay a few cents for the EBS storage. You can start and stop it again whenever needed.

You can also use something like EC2 Start-Stop if you want to schedule the instance to run e.g. only during business hours instead of 24/7 and save some more on compute time.

Hope that helps :)

MLu
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  • Will it affect my Route53 settings? Also, i am having issues finding pricing on creating a backup template – somejkuser Jan 12 '19 at 21:32
  • @JonathanKushner does the instance have a *Public IP* or *Elastic IP* address? Public IP changes when you stop/start the EC2, Elastic IP doesn’t. Private IP stays the same. That in turn answers whether you Route53 record will need to be updated. – MLu Jan 12 '19 at 22:01
  • Yes it has a public ip so it will change. what about the pricing on a backup template? – somejkuser Jan 12 '19 at 22:08
  • @JonathanKushner With AMI you only pay for the storage used. It’s described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18661365 – MLu Jan 12 '19 at 22:17
  • Elastic IPs are static IPs, which are best for servers. Note that they have a small cost if they're allocated to your account but not attached to a running server. – Tim Jan 13 '19 at 00:19