Copying an EBS Snapshot to S3 for low-cost storage

Solution 1:

As at 11th August 2016 AWS Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB, a 47% reduction. Standard S3 is still cheaper, at around $0.03 per GB. I guess the difference must be in the management overhead.

Solution 2:

I've now created an open-source tool called snap-to-s3 which accomplishes that. It turns the snapshot into a temporary EBS volume, then tars up, compresses and uploads the partitions of the volume to S3:

https://github.com/thenickdude/snap-to-s3

You can opt to use dd instead of tar to preserve every byte of the volume instead, if you like.

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Solution 3:

Amazon does not offer this as a feature.

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Solution 4:

a not so easy trick:

• attach EBS to an another machine (unmounted, read-only)
• make a dd image of a volume
• move dd image to S3

for restoring a dd image, look at How to restore a dd image to an EBS volume