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We are creating an EBS Snapshot from a volume of 5 TB attached to an EC2 instance in an AWS region (us-east-1). This is the initial snapshot (first snapshot) created from the EBS volume. The volume itself is also created from from a series of incremental snapshots (created earlier) in the same region.

When i create the EBS snapshot in the same region, it takes less than 5 minutes for the snapshot to be created (initial snapshot). I understand that this snapshot is initial, as it is the first snapshot being created from the volume.

My question is, this snapshot being the initial one (first one to be created from the restored EBS Volume), will it copy a new set of data (5 TB) internally to S3 (as Snapshots are stored in S3 behind the scenes) ? . OR because the EBS volume was also restored from some incremental snapshot, when I create first snapshot from this restored volume (in the same region), will it internally just store pointer to the S3 location for the files, as those files are already somewhere in S3 (because the volume was restored from an incremental snapshot) ?

The intent is to understand the reason behind the fact that when I create a full (initial) snapshot from the EBS volume in the same region (us-east-1), it takes less than few minutes, (similar behavior to incremental snapshot), but the moment I attempt to copy the EBS snapshot to another AWS Region, it takes hours (in excess of 12 hours) to complete the EBS snapshot copy operation to other AWS Region (us-west-2) in the absence of any previous snapshots being copied to the remote AWS region earlier, from the same volume

Mandar Dindorkar
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1 Answers1

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Creating Snapshots in the same region is incremental so if you have existing snapshot aws will only backup the incremental changes, however, when you copy the snapshot to another region, it has no history of the snapshot so it will be considered as brand new snapshot.

AWS PS
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  • i get that. But does AWS create a new (first) snapshot from a fresh volume in the same region as incremental or full , and does it backup only incremental changes , because the volume was also restored from a snapshot at some point of time (and if that volume still exists) ? – Mandar Dindorkar Dec 31 '19 at 08:12