Amazon Web Services Now Makes It Easier To Move EBS Snapshots Between Regions

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) allows developers to create storage volumes that can be mounted by Amazon EC2 instances, among other things. While it was always relatively easy to move an EC2 instance to a new availability region the company’s network, moving EBS instances was always a bit more involved. Now, however, Amazon has introduced EBS Snapshot Copy. This new service, the company says, lets developers move EBS Snapshots from one region to another with just a few clicks.

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As Amazon notes, the typical use cases for this feature include geographic expansion and migration for those who want to launch their application in a new region, as well as disaster recovery, as you could use the service to “back up your data and your log files across different geographical locations at regular intervals to minimize data loss and recovery time.” As Amazon notes, its users can move snapshots they have created themselves, as well as snapshots from the AWS Marketplace, VM Import/Export, and Storage Gateway. Users, of course, will have to pay the usual transfer prices to move their snapshots between regions and pay the regular storage prices for the applicable regions as well.

Soon, Amazon will also let developers move their public and custom-created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) between regions as well, which is also at present a pretty involved process.