Create a Snapshot of the EBS Volume using Python

Creating the snapshot of our EBS volume of the EC2 Instance is one of the great strategies for backing up the data stored in EBS

What is snapshot

You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data.

When you delete a snapshot, only the data unique to that snapshot is removed. Each snapshot contains all of the information that is needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume.

Boto3

Boto3 is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Python, which allows Python developers to write software that makes use of services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

Create a snapshot using boto3

Create a client for EC2 Service

ec2 = boto3.resource('ec2', 'region-name')

Create snapshot

    response = self.ec2.create_snapshot(
        VolumeId=volume_id
    )

Verify the status

# response is a dictionary containing ResponseMetadata and SnapshotId
    status_code = response['ResponseMetadata']['HTTPStatusCode']
    snapshot_id = response['SnapshotId']
    
# check if status_code was 200 or not to ensure the snapshot was created successfully
    if status_code == 200:
        return snapshot_id

Also published on Medium.