Initiates a snapshot of a volume.
AWS Storage Gateway provides the ability to back up point-in-time
snapshots of your data to Amazon Simple Storage (Amazon S3) for durable
off-site recovery, as well as import the data to an Amazon Elastic Block
Store (EBS) volume in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You can take
snapshots of your gateway volume on a scheduled or ad hoc basis. This
API enables you to take an ad hoc snapshot. For more information, see
Editing a snapshot schedule.
In the create_snapshot
request, you
identify the volume by providing its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You
must also provide description for the snapshot. When AWS Storage Gateway
takes the snapshot of specified volume, the snapshot and description
appears in the AWS Storage Gateway console. In response, AWS Storage
Gateway returns you a snapshot ID. You can use this snapshot ID to check
the snapshot progress or later use it when you want to create a volume
from a snapshot. This operation is only supported in stored and cached
volume gateway type.
To list or delete a snapshot, you must use the Amazon EC2 API. For more
information, see
DescribeSnapshots
or
DeleteSnapshot
in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference.
Volume and snapshot IDs are changing to a longer length ID format. For
more information, see the important note on the
Welcome
page.