#AWS snapshot tool

Many interesting things can be done with EBS volumes and snaphots.

The goal of this project is to create a stupidly simple tool for managing, among other features, cloud volumes and snapshots. Ideally this tool would be used as a cloud backup solution by leveraging the power of snapshots. If you are unfamiliar with snapshots, take a look here to get started.

This tool will not work very well with filesystems that do not have quiescing capabilites, ext4 and xfs are good exapmles. For Windows support a VSS provider would need to be implemented to quiesce Windows volumes for snapshotting.

If you're interested, I wrote a blog post with some more detail and use cases here.

###Installation

The easiest way to get up and running is to run

pip install -U autosnap

Alternatively, you can fork/clone this project from github. After it has been cloned, run

python setup.py develop

from the autosnap root directory and you should be good to go.

###Configuration

You will need to create a default config in the root of this directory called .config that contains the following AWS account info.

region = us-west-1
aws_access_key_id = xxx
aws_secret_access_key = xxx
owner_id = xxx 

Where region is the default region to use for this tool, aws_access_key_id is the ID for the specific user that will interface with AWS, aws_secret_access_key is the associated key for the ID and owner_id is the associated AWS account that contains the snapshots and volumes to work with.

This config can be update on the fly from the command line by passing the --config flag to the tool. By default the config is expected to be placed in the root of this project in a file called .config, and one will be created there if it cannot be found.

Note You can obtain your AWS owner_id by navigating to the AWS management console, selecting your user account then My Account. Under account settings there should be an Account ID which corresponds to the owner ID.

###Usage

The easiest way to get started using this tool after it has been installed and the config file has been created is to run autosnap --help to get a listing of all the commands and various options.

Autosnap will detect if a configuration is present and prompt the user to create one if it can't find one. Users should follow the input prompts to create a configuration.

After creating a config, running autosnap without any parameters will list stats and information about your AWS volume and snapshot environment by default. For example, typing the 'autosnap' command after installation will print out details about your environment.

$ autosnap
Autosnap stats

Current region:          us-west-1
Volumes managed:                 1
Snapshots managed:               1

###Disclaimer

The functionality of this code is currently expirmental so you should only run this at your own risk. This will not destroy any data but it should be run if you know what you are doing, and with caution!

This can potentially crete a loarge number of snapshots, which will cost extra against your AWS bill. It shouldn't be a signficant amount but you should be aware that EBS volumes and snapshots aren't free.

###Contributing

Anybody is welcome to contribute to this project. Inquiries can be directed to me via github issues or you are more than welcome to email me directly at josh.reichardt@gmail.com.

###TODO

• Improve error checking and handling
• Improve logging
• Ability to create AMI from snapshot
• Add tests and test framework
• Thicken out usage section of README

###License

This project is licensed under the MIT licencse. See LICENSE for full details.