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Creating a snapshot of your Linux or Unix instance in Amazon Lightsail

Last updated: June 28, 2018

You can create snapshots of your Linux/Unix-based Lightsail instances. An instance snapshot is a copy of the system disk and matches the original machine configuration (memory, CPU, disk size, and data transfer rate). If you've attached block storage disks to your instance, Lightsail copies those additional disks as part of your snapshot. For more information, see Snapshots in Amazon Lightsail.

Note

The steps to create a snapshot of a Windows Server-based Lightsail instance are different. For more information, see Creating a snapshot of your Windows Server instance in Amazon Lightsail.

You must already have an instance in Lightsail to create a snapshot of it. After you have an instance, follow these steps to create a snapshot:

  1. On the Lightsail home page, choose the name of your instance for which you want to create a snapshot.

  2. Choose the Snapshots tab.

  3. Under the Manual snapshots section of the page, choose Create snapshot, then enter a name for your snapshot.

    Resource names:

    • Must be unique within each AWS Region in your Lightsail account.

    • Must contain 2 to 255 characters.

    • Must start and end with an alphanumeric character or number.

    • Can include alphanumeric characters, numbers, periods, dashes, and underscores.

  4. Choose Create.

    You can see the snapshot you just created with a status of Snapshotting....

    After the snapshot is finished, you can create another instance from the snapshot. For example, you may want to choose a larger size bundle than you had previously.

Important

When you create a new instance from a snapshot, Lightsail lets you create an instance bundle that is either the same size or larger size. We do not currently support creating a smaller instance size from a snapshot. The smaller options will be grayed out when you create a new instance from a snapshot.

To create a larger instance size from a snapshot, you can use the Lightsail console, the create-instances-from-snapshot CLI command. or the CreateInstancesFromSnapshot API operation. For more information, see Creating an instance from a snapshot in Amazon Lightsail.

For more information about Lightsail bundles, see Lightsail Pricing.