Fact: Over 49.2 million snapshots, images, and backups have been created using Skeddly.
You could create snapshots, images, and backups of your instances, volumes, VMs, and disks using the cloud management portals. However, you need to find the correct resources and manually create each one. If you want to do this every day, you must login to the management console every day and create every single snapshot and image. If you forget a day, then your snapshots and images won't get created.
Skeddly can be used to automatically create snapshots and images for you. It can create snapshots of individual EBS volumes, RDS instances, Redshift clusters. It can create AMI images of your EC2 instances. It can even examine your EC2 instances and create snapshots of each attached EBS volume automatically.
View the Amazon Webinar Backup and Recovery for Linux with Amazon S3 on YouTube. Skeddly is mentioned as a third-party tool for scheduling EBS backups. Skip ahead to 34:00 to see the mention. Thanks Jeff!
Skeddly can create the following types of snapshots and images:
You can specify each specific resource for which you want to create snapshots and images.
You can also let Skeddly find resources at the time of backup by searching for specific criteria such as resource tags or by name. This allows you to configure Skeddly's schedule only once. When a new resource is added, simply give it your chosen resource tag and it will be included in the next execution.
Tip: This works great with Amazon CloudFormation templates. Simply include your desired tags in your template and your generated resources will be included when the next set of snapshots or images are created.
Skeddly will create your snapshots and images for you. Once creation has started, it will monitor the entire creation process until it is complete. If a problem occurs along the way, you will be notified.
For EC2 and Lightsail instances, to ensure volume consistency, Skeddly can stop your instance before the snapshots are created. Your instances will be restarted once the snapshots are in progress. Skeddly can even preserve your Elastic IP addresses.
When your snapshots and images are complete, resource tags can be added to them. Resource tags are useful for categorization, archiving, and cost allocation. Tags can be created that contain runtime information such as time and date and instance information.
For extra protection against disaster, copy your snapshots to another region or AWS account.
As time goes on, you may want to delete old snapshots and images. Skeddly can delete old snapshots and images based on matching criteria and age. It can also ensure that a minimum number of snapshots and images are preserved.
Delete snapshots using a simple first-in-first-out scheme, or a more advanced Grandfather-Father-Son scheme.
There's even a test mode that will tell you which snapshots would be deleted, without worrying about deleting the wrong ones.
All of this can happen automatically on any schedule you choose.