Amazon EBS adds the ability to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance

In May 2019, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) launched the ability for customers to take crash-consistent snapshots of all Amazon EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance with a single API call. Now you can choose to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of Amazon EBS data volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate taking crash-consistent snapshots of the same subset of Amazon EBS volumes on a retention schedule defined by DLM policies.

Amazon EBS Snapshots are point-in-time copies of Amazon EBS volumes stored on Amazon S3. Customers use snapshots in their backup or disaster recovery plans. Snapshots are commonly used to create a backup of a critical workload such as a large database or file system. Customers often have multiple EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance. Some of these volumes may belong to different applications or may contain temporary data such as cache. As a result, a subset of these volumes may not need to be backed up. With this change, you can now choose to snapshot only the Amazon EBS volumes you want using a single API call or the Amazon EC2 console, also saving cost. If you are using DLM, you can set your policies to automatically backup the subset of volumes using DLM policies and tags. This saves you from having to manage scripts, or manually delete the snapshots you don’t want, thus simplifying your operations.

This capability is available through the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console in all AWS commercial Regions except AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, China (Beijing, operated by Sinnet), and China (Ningxia, operated by NWCD).