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Does the frequency of AWS snapshot have any effect on price because of network consumption or any other parameter, say snapshot every 30 minute or a single snapshot at the end of the day.

kamakhya mishra
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4 Answers4

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There isn't any cost associated with the creation of a snapshot, such as for network bandwidth.

The cost is in storing the snapshots, so the cost is related to how many you keep, not now many you make... as well as how different they all are from each other (and, of course, volume size, to some extent). If you were to snapshot a volume every few minutes and nothing on that volume were changing, then the incremental cost for each additonal snapshot being stored would approach $0, because EBS snapshots are automatically deduplicated.

Michael - sqlbot
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  • Thanks for your reply. So lets say, additional data is being written to EBS at a rate of 1GB per 30 minutes, that means in a day 48 GB of new data i have. Now, would there be any difference in the cost if a take a snapshot every 30 minute of 1 GB or a snapshot at the end of the day for the whole 48 GB. As the snapshot are incremental the math says the cost should be the same, but as i am invoking the snapshot service 48 time in one case and 1 time in other case would there be any difference? – kamakhya mishra Jul 25 '18 at 11:40
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    There is a difference if you *keep* them all, of course, because in the scenario you described, the 1 GB may be overwriting other (deleted) data on the volume, and the deleted data is still on the old snapshots. If you don't keep them all, there is still a potential difference, but it should be much smaller and harder to quantify. Why? EBS snapshots are *block device snapshots* with no awareness of filesystem semantics. They only know that blocks on the disk differ, for the most part they don't know or care about concepts like "add" or "delete" -- only "change." – Michael - sqlbot Jul 25 '18 at 12:10
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For snapshots, pricing calculates based on the total size of your initial snapshot and the incremental amount in the size.

For example, if you have got a 100GB volume, initial pricing applied for 100GB snapshot. And let's say the 2nd snapshot is incremental and size is 101 GB (which has added only 1GB), you will charge for 100 + 1 GB of size. Likewise you will be charged for the accumulative size.

However if you need your snapshots cross-region, there will be a data transfer charges as well.

More Info: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/

Pubudu Jayawardana
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Just so that it will help someone am adding this answer, neither frequency nor keeping or deleting the snapshot is going to affect the cost to support this i am quoting these line from aws user guide:

Deleting a snapshot might not reduce your organization's data storage costs. Other snapshots might reference that snapshot's data, and referenced data is always preserved. If you delete a snapshot containing data being used by a later snapshot, costs associated with the referenced data are allocated to the later snapshot.

Reference: Deleting an Amazon EBS Snapshot

Metro Smurf
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kamakhya mishra
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Yes, you're paying for the snapshot storage. Per EBS Pricing:

$0.05 per GB-month of data stored

However:

Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size. For the first snapshot of a volume, Amazon EBS saves a full copy of your data to Amazon S3. For each incremental snapshot, only the changed part of your Amazon EBS volume is saved.

So while you will pay more if you do snapshots frequently it's hard to determine how much more. You may consider a different backup solution as EBS is not the best one.

Jakub Kania
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