aws-snapshot-tool

aws-snapshot-tool is a Python 3 script to make it easy to roll snapshots of your EBS volumes.

Simply add a tag to each volume you want snapshots of, configure and install a cronjob for aws-snapshot-tool and you are off. It handles rolling snapshots per day, week and month so that you can set up the retention policy to suit.

Features:

• Python 3 / boto3 based: Easy to configure and install as a crontab
• Simple tag system: Just add a tag to each of the EBS volumes you want snapshots of
• Configurable retention policy: Configure how many day, week, and month snapshots you want to retain
• Flexible credentials: Uses the standard boto3 credential chain (environment variables, ~/.aws/credentials, or an IAM instance role) — no need to store keys in the config file
• SNS notifications: Works with Amazon SNS out of the box, so you can be notified of snapshot runs
• Throttling-aware: Uses boto3 adaptive retries to back off automatically on EC2 API rate limits

Usage

1. Install Python 3 and boto3: pip3 install -r requirements.txt

2. Create an SNS topic in AWS and copy the ARN into the config file (optional)

3. Subscribe with an email address to the SNS topic

4. Create a snapshot user in IAM (or use an IAM instance role) and give it the policy from iam.policy.sample

5. Provide credentials via environment variables, ~/.aws/credentials, an IAM role, or the config file

6. Copy config.sample to config.py

7. Decide how many snapshot versions you want for day/week/month and change this in config.py

8. Change the region in config.py

9. Optionally specify a proxy in config.py

10. Give every volume you want snapshots of a tag with a key and a value, and put these in the config file. Default: "MakeSnapshot" with the value "True"

11. Install the script in the cron:

    # chmod +x makesnapshots.py
    # crontab -e
    30 1 * * 1-5 /opt/aws-snapshot-tool/makesnapshots.py day
    30 2 * * 6 /opt/aws-snapshot-tool/makesnapshots.py week
    30 3 1 * * /opt/aws-snapshot-tool/makesnapshots.py month
    

The script exits non-zero when one or more volumes failed to process, so cron's error reporting (or your monitoring) can pick it up in addition to the SNS report.

Additional Notes

The user or role that executes the script needs the policy from iam.policy.sample.

Snapshots are matched for rotation by their description prefix (day_snapshot, week_snapshot, month_snapshot), so snapshots created by version 3.x of this tool are rotated seamlessly by version 4.x.