Cost-effectively store volumes that I won't need for a few months?

Question

I have two EC2 instances I created this summer for personal use while learning basic ML concepts and doing Kaggle competitions. I'd like to save the work on them on eventually be able to use them again if I'm interested in competing in a Kaggle competition again without having to setup a new instance, but probably won't need them for a few months (and when I do need them, it won't be at a moment's notice).

Each instance has an 128gb EBS gp2 volume that's costing me ~$13/month. I was wondering if there's a way that I could pull these off AWS so that I'm not still paying for them when I don't need them. Is there a feature where I can store a snapshot outside of AWS and eventually upload it to AWS and restore the volumes if I need them?

Or is there a much cheaper (slower) storage method for keeping them on AWS? (sc1 volumes are $0.025/GB-month, but is there something even cheaper?)

Edit: Clarified volume type ($0.10/GB-month gp2) Edit2: I think my best bet for now is to snapshot them since each only has ~30GB of used space (60GB*$0.05 = $3/month) and delete the original volumes.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 31 '17 at 15:21

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You can put all this data into Amazon Glacier which is far more cheaper ( around 10% cost )

answered Jul 31 '17 at 15:21

Deepak Singhal

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You cannot store EBS in Glacier. – helloV Jul 31 '17 at 15:22
you need do use aws s3 sync to copy data to s3. He wants just a backup of his data – Deepak Singhal Jul 31 '17 at 15:24
This (admittedly similar post) seems to disagree: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31236115/is-it-possible-to-move-ec2-volumes-to-amazon-glacier-without-having-to-download – moon- Jul 31 '17 at 15:28

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 31 '17 at 23:21

If you wish to retain the exact contents of the disk volumes, the choice really comes down to:

Amazon EBS volume snapshots
ISO images

Amazon EBS volume snapshots are only charged for blocks that are used. They are the easiest to create and restore. It is not possible to export an Amazon EBS snapshot.

If you wish to move a disk image out of Amazon EC2 (eg to download, or to store in Amazon S3), use a standard disk utility to create a .iso image of the disk. This can later be restored to a new disk volume, and can even be directly mounted in read-only mode using disk utilities.

Thanks for the idea! I think I'm going to use EBS volume snaps for now, but the .iso image is an interesting solution I hadn't thought of. — moon-, Aug 01 '17 at 14:53

Cost-effectively store volumes that I won't need for a few months?

2 Answers2