Archiving Amazon AWS instances

Solution 1:

Once a project is done, what's the best way (cost, organization) to archive everything? If your code is sitting in GitHub you may not have anything on the EC2 that you care to archive.

If you do have some data to archive (on your EC2) you can zip it up and send it to AWS S3, or better still AWS Glacier.

If you're interested in storing a complete copy of the EC2 you can use the AWS EC2 Snapshot feature (this stores data in S3 for you, but you don't have direct access to the bucket).

RDS is a similar situation. You could backup your data and send it to S3/Glacier, or you could use the Snapshot feature.

I've heard about Glacier but I don't think believe it's for snapshot storage...

Glacier can store your own data but you cannot choose where EC2/RDS snapshots live.