How to schedule maintenance of Snapshots

Follow these steps to schedule Maintenance (retention period) of the old EBS Snapshots:

Go to EC2 section by selecting EC2 from the Main Menu.

Select AWS account and region of EBS volume to schedule backup.

On the EC2 Instance list, click the black arrow on the left to expand EC2 for the attached EBS.

From the menu, select Schedule Snapshot.

Under the Scheduler Window is the Snapshot Maintenance section, where the following configurations can be set:

Two options define which Snapshots should not be deleted:

Keep All From Last – Keeps all Snapshots created within the last “x” periods (select as hours, days, weeks, months, or years), e.g. to keep all Snapshots created within the last 45 days, this is how your setup appears:

Keep One Per Period From Last – Only keeps the last Snapshots created in the given period (hours, days, weeks, months, or years), e.g. to keep one Snapshot per week from the last 8 weeks, this is how your setup appears:

To manage more complex needs, you can create multiple maintenances. For example, to setup maintenance to keep all Snapshots from the last 7 days, 1 Snapshot per week from the last 4 weeks, and 1 Snapshot per month from the last 4 months, this is how your setup appears:

When you are using cross-region copy snapshot in your scheduler, you have another set of options that allow you to create more complex scenarios. Three options are available on the drop down list that allow you to schedule separate maintenance for source and destination region. These options are:

Apply Only to Source Region –Maintenance is applied only to snapshots in source region

Apply Only to Cross Region – Maintenance is applied only to snapshots in destination region

Apply to Both Regions – Maintenance is applied to both source and destination regions

When maintenance is running, Snapshots that do not match the scheduled criteria are deleted (except the most recent one) – for security reasons, the last snapshot is never deleted.

Additionally, maintenances scheduled under the EC2 section will delete all snapshots which do not meet the selected criteria, even snapshots not created by our system.

To include only snapshots created by our system, use templates. Under the Schedule Snapshot Maintenance action is the checkbox Delete only Snapshots that were created by associate template. To use this feature, both Schedule Snapshot and Schedule Snapshot Maintenance must be associated with the same template.

Additionally, templates can be used to apply the same maintenance to multiple EBS volumes.

To learn more about templates, please read Introduction to Scheduler Templates

Note: the maintenance feature is only available under Deluxe or higher-rated plans.