Really easy Amazon EC2 backup/restore solution. Works by making volume snapshots periodically (with expiration) and taking the last snapshot when restoring.

Fallout is really easy, I suggest you try it.

$ gem install fallout

This gem installs fallout executable. Don't forget to run rbenv rehash, if you're on rbenv.

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_REGION

AWS_REGION is required to be able to connect with AWS SDK. Specify the region of the EC2 instance you want to back up/restore.

AWS_AVAILABILITY_ZONE - availability zone where to create the new volume for your instance in.

If you don't set it, it will default to your AWS_REGION + 'a', e.g. eu-central-1a.

AWS_ATTACH_VOLUME_AS_DEVICE - will use /dev/sda1 as default.

Fallout supports 2 commands:

Syntax:

fallout backup -v <volume_id> -k <keep_days>

Example:

$ fallout backup -v vol-23ab3d -k 7

 Deleted snapshots snap-6695b3a5, snap-ca6a3069
 Created new snapshot snap-b67f7725, expires after 2014-09-14

This will create a snapshot for the specified volume and will mark it as valid for 7 days. It will also delete all expired snapshots, created for the specified volume.

When creating a snapshot, fallout will tag it with a special expires_on tag. When running the backup, fallout will search for any expired snapshots and remove them. This way you can have fallout running every day, it will keep N most fresh snapshots automatically.

Restoring is a one-liner too.

Syntax:

fallout restore -i <instance_id> -v <volume_id>

Example:

$ fallout restore -i i-f7850bda -v vol-72436837

Shutting down your instance.
Shut down instance successfully: i-f7850bda, status: stopped
Detached volume vol-72436837 from instance i-f7850bda successfully
Created new volume from the latest snapshot (vol-3942697c)
Attached new volume to instance
Successfully restored and started the instance with the new volume
Instance public hostname: ec2-54-165-20-157.compute-1.amazonaws.com
You may want to delete the old, detached volume vol-72436837 and old volume snapshots
IMPORTANT: You must update your backup command to use new volume_id: vol-3942697c

Restoring with fallout requires you to have at least 1 snapshot for the volume. The process will shutdown the instance, detach the root volume, create new volume from the latest snapshot and attach it as /dev/sda1 device(can be overridden with AWS_ATTACH_VOLUME_AS_DEVICE env var). Then the process will boot the instance with the new volume and display its public hostname.

I created this gem purely for my own purposes, we only have a handful of EC2 instances and the gem is working fine for us.

I run fallout backup daily with cron.

Contributions, tips/advices and pull requests are welcome.

This code is MIT licensed:

Copyright (c) 2015 Valentin Vasilyev

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

1. Fork it ( http://github.com//fallout/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request