Is it possible to move EC2 volumes to Amazon Glacier without having to download and upload it?

Question

I am trying to reduce costs of my AWS system. I thought of moving some volumes I rarely use to Amazon Glacier, but I don't find any way I can do it inside AWS besides downloading the volume and uploading to Glacier, which sounds terrible.

I am wondering, is it possible to do this automatically? Assign some EC2 volumes to glacier directly from the EC2 console?

Thanks

Solution

EBS volumes cannot be copied or migrated to Amazon Glacier.

EBS snapshots, even though they are stored in Amazon S3, also cannot be moved to Amazon Glacier.

There are 2 ways to put data into Amazon Glacier:

1. Put the file/data directly into an Amazon Glacier vault.
2. Put the file/data in Amazon S3, then use an Amazon S3 lifecycle to move the object(s) to Amazon Glacier.

You could use aws s3 sync to copy your filesystem into S3, then have that moved to Glacier. But there is no magic solution for what you want to achieve.

Comments

[Eric Twilegar]

2019 and still true. f'in aws.

[ConstantFun]

Would it be possible to instead copy the files directly to Amazon Glacier instead of the whole EBS volume? Instead of using the above aws s3 sync to copy to s3 and then to Glacier.

[Matt Houser]

@ConstantFun Yes, I say that in my answer: "Put the file/data directly into an Amazon Glacier vault"

[ConstantFun]

@MattHouser In the answer I am not sure if you are referring to the direct moves start point as a local environment or an EBS volume. Sorry for the confusion.

[Matt Houser]

@ConstantFun If you want to put the files from your EBS volume into Glacier, then you would execute the AWS CLI on the EC2 instance to do so.