Amazon EC2 - Local backup of EBS AMI

Question

I would like to store a local copy of my EBS AMIs for safekeeping/piece of mind, but this does not seem to be very straight-forward.

The only way I have come across is to convert the EBS AMI to instance-store/S3 'format', bundling it and uploading it to S3 as describe in the link, and then downloading it via an s3 browser.

http://www.dowdandassociates.com/content/howto-convert-an-amazon-ec2-ebs-image-to-an-instance-store-image/

Then, when I want to re-upload, I will have to convert back to EBS via something like this: http://www.eaglegenomics.com/2011/05/how-to-convert-s3-instance-store-amis-to-ebs-amis/

I am not entirely sure this method will even work as desired. Is it incorrect, and is there a better alternative? Is it possible to download an AMI from an s3 non 'user-visible' bucket?

Answer 1

Can confirm that this indeed works, if a little inconvenient. Third party tool required to download from non user-visible s3 buckets. s3browser/bucket explorer should do.

Answer 2

Not sure that keeping an AMI on premise is a useful strategy: it would only be useful if you could launch a virtual machine out of it outside of AWS. As long as you rely on AWS, you should assume that AMI’s and snapshots are kept safe in S3. You can always copy to another region or even store in another account. Copy backup outside of AWS make sense more for the data (like DB dump or files and folders) and not the entire AMI.