Script Day: Automatically backup your EC2 instance using snapshots

The following script I install as a cron job on Amazon AWS virtual machines I deploy, to allow them to backup themselves automatically. The script uses the EC2 management utilities that are normally available on “Amazon Linux” installations (and can be easily installed on other Linux distributions) to create EBS snapshots of the current mounted root EBS volume1.
(more…)

  1. I don’t expect this script to work for instances that have an instance-stored root device, but I don’t expect to encounter these any more []