Checking to see what is in old AWS EBS Snapshots - Green-Biome-Institute/AWS GitHub Wiki

How to check what is inside of an EC2 EBS snapshot!

  1. Build an EC2 instance
  2. Create a volume from the snapshot that is in the same availability zone as the ec2 instance
    1. In order to check the ec2 instance availability zone, have aws cli tools set up and configured (use aws configure), and use the command aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-id [your instance I], then scroll up to where you see “Availability Zone” and to the right of that is the availability zone. It will looking something like “us-west-2a”
  3. Use aws ec2 attach-volume --volume-id [your volume ID] --instance-id [your instance ID] --device /dev/sdf
  4. Use lsblk to identify the name of the device
    1. This will result something like:
ubuntu@ip-172-31-52-157:~$ lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0          7:0    0 26.6M  1 loop /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/5163
loop1          7:1    0 55.5M  1 loop /snap/core18/2344
loop2          7:2    0 61.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/1405
loop3          7:3    0 79.9M  1 loop /snap/lxd/22923
loop4          7:4    0 43.6M  1 loop /snap/snapd/15177
nvme0n1      259:0    0    8G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1  259:1    0  7.9G  0 part /
├─nvme0n1p14 259:2    0    4M  0 part 
└─nvme0n1p15 259:3    0  106M  0 part /boot/efi
nvme1n1      259:4    0   50G  0 disk 
└─nvme1n1p1  259:5    0   50G  0 part

The very last one is your new volume addition. The entry “nvme1n1p1” is the partition of the new volume we will use 5. Use sudo mount /dev/nvme1n1p1 /newvolume/ 6. Then you can navigate into the volume by using cd /newvolume

Once you have seen what is on the volume and decided what to do with it, you can unmount and detach the volume by doing: 7. sudo umount /dev/nvme1n1p1 8. aws ec2 detach-volume --volume-id [your volume ID]

All done! You can delete the volume and snapshot to save room on the AWS account using the online dashboard.