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    Fri, 20 Aug 2010

    /Hosting/Amazon/EBS: Use python-boto to Snapshot Amazon EBS Volume

    The Amazon EC2 toolkit[1] works great, but it is a Java app which makes it an incredibly bloated way to gain access to a couple of command-line tools on a server. python-boto[2] takes up all of about 1M, and its minimal Python dependencies were already installed on my Amazon instance. The necessary python script is very simple:

    #!/usr/bin/env python thisVolume = 'vol-xxxxxxxx' waitSnapshot = 10 # wait increment (in seconds) while waiting for snapshot to complete print 'Logging into Amazon AWS....' from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection conn = EC2Connection('<aws_access_key_id>', '<aws_secret_access_key>') print '' print 'Stopping MySQL....' import os os.system("/etc/init.d/mysql stop") print '' print 'Beginning backup of ' + thisVolume snapshot = conn.create_snapshot(thisVolume) newSnapshot = snapshot.id print 'Created new volume snapshot:', newSnapshot import time waitSnapshotTotal = waitSnapshot snapshot = conn.get_all_snapshots(str(newSnapshot)) print '' while snapshot[0].status != 'completed': print 'Snapshot status is ' + snapshot[0].status + ', ' \ 'wait ', waitSnapshotTotal, ' secs for the snapshot to complete before re-starting MySQL.' time.sleep(waitSnapshot) waitSnapshotTotal = waitSnapshotTotal + waitSnapshot snapshot = conn.get_all_snapshots(str(newSnapshot)) print snapshot print '' print 'Restarting MySQL....' os.system("/etc/init.d/mysql start")

    The only gotcha was that the stale version of python-boto in Debian stable did not seem to have a "create_snapshot" function, so I just grabbed a newer version from Debian testing.

    And of course, just call this script from cron daily to make backups automatic.

    [1] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=351&categoryID=88
    [2] http://code.google.com/p/boto/

    posted at: 13:27 | path: /Hosting/Amazon/EBS | permanent link to this entry