AWS Snapshots
AWS Snapshots are point-in-time backups of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, which provide durable block-level storage for Amazon EC2 instances. They capture the data on an EBS volume at a specific moment, enabling data recovery, disaster recovery, and migration across AWS regions or accounts. Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changed blocks since the last snapshot to optimize cost and storage efficiency.
Developers should use AWS Snapshots for critical data protection, such as backing up application databases, file systems, or configuration data on EC2 instances to prevent data loss from accidental deletion, corruption, or hardware failures. They are essential for compliance requirements, enabling regular backups, and facilitating tasks like creating new volumes from snapshots for testing, cloning environments, or migrating workloads across AWS infrastructure.