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Nic Cottrell
Asked: 2018-04-25 04:41:59 +0800 CST

How can I see how long an EBS snapshot took?

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I'm trying to do some planning and have been experimenting with EBS snapshots for data backups. I want to see how long a snapshot took of a 50G volume, but I only see the start time, not the completion time under the "Description" tag in AWS console. Is there a way to find out this information 'after the fact'?

amazon-ebs

1 Answers

  1. While the only way to see how long a snapshot takes is as @Vijay Muddu has mentioned (by manually starting it and monitoring the status), there may be some additional information that will assist.

    EBS Snapshots are Incremental

    This means that once the first snapshot has been completed, the second snapshot will only contain the blocks that have changed. AWS keeps track of which blocks need to be retained, so you can delete the first snapshot without having to worry.

    EBS Snapshots are Point-in-Time

    Once you initiate a snapshot it is created immediately, but the snapshot is shown as pending until all of the modified blocks have been transferred to S3. So any changes that occur after you initiated the snapshot will not affect the snapshot.

    Some Instance Types Allow Multiple Concurrent Snapshots

    You can create a new snapshot while there is already one pending.

    There is a limit of five pending snapshots for a single gp2, io1, or Magnetic volume, and one pending snapshot for a single st1 or sc1 volume.

    There's more information in the AWS Documentation.

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