Create an EBS Standard Volume from an EBS Snapshot

Objective

To create an EBS Volume from an EBS Snapshot

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

A snapshot created from an EBS Standard volume stored in an accessible S3 bucket.

Overview

Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) allows for block level storage to be created for use with Amazon EC2 Instances. With an EBS volume, you can create a snapshot to reference a particular point in time of a volume.There are several scenarios where you might need to create an EBS volume from a snapshot.  One is because you might need the data on the volume to be accessed by more than one Server instance.  Currently, you can only mount an EBS volume to one instance at a time.  Another is if you are moving your application's permanent storage from S3 to EBS. 

There are two EBS volume types: Standard and Provisioned IOPS. A Standard volume is best suited for boot volumes and provides roughly 100 IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) on average. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to provide predictable, high performance I/O workloads that range up to 4000 IOPS and are best suited for database workloads. This tutorial shows you how to create an EBS Standard Volume from a Snapshot. For information about creating an EBS Provisioned IOPS from a Snapshot, see Create an EBS Provisioned IOPS Volume from an EBS Snapshot.

EBS volumes and snapshots are EC2 region-specific.  You cannot use a volume/snapshot that you created in EC2-US in a different region like EC2-EU.  This tutorial assumes you are creating an EBS volume from a snapshot in the EC2-US region.

Steps

Go to Clouds > AWS Region > EBS Snapshots and select a snapshot. Click the Create Volume from Snapshot button from a Snapshot's homepage.

By default, the nickname of the volume will be identical to the name of the EBS Snapshot.  Be sure to specify the availability zone where you want to create the new volume. 

Note:  You will not be able to change the volume's availability zone once it's been created. 

If you leave the "Size in GB" field blank, the minimum file size that is needed to create the volume will be used (1GB - 1TB).

Note: When you select Standard volumes, you are charged by the amount you provision in GB per month until you release it. For more information about EBS pricing, see Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Pricing.

Click the Create button.

A confirmation window will display some basic information about the new volume and also allow you to attach it to an instance.

See also

• Create a New EBS Volume
• Create an EBS Provisioned IOPS Volume From a Snapshot