Is it possible to backup an AWS EC2 "instance-store" type instance into S3?

Question

I have a running instance in EC2. Its "Root Device Type" is Instance-store (not EBS).

And I'd like to back it up manually into S3.

Is it possible?

Thank you!

Answer 1

There are many solutions available for backing up ephemeral storage a.k.a instance store. I have used Duplicity before for this purpose.

See:

Duplicity

Automated Backup and Restore using Duplicity and AWS S3

Duplicity + S3: easy, cheap, encrypted, automated full-disk backups for your servers

Answer 2

You could use the dd command and stream the output to s3

From within the instance:

$ dd if=/dev/xvda bs=1M status=progress | aws s3 cp - s3://your-bucket-name/root_device.img

substitute the /dev/xvda with the file system you want to back up

Answer 3

You can back it up by using AWS CLI, you can back it up by using AWS console. Or you can back it up on the system level by using third-party solutions. For example, Cloudberry Backup. Just install in directly on your EC2 instance and initiate the Image Based Backup.