How do I create Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies from selected EBS volumes in the EC2 console?

Resolution

You can select one or more Amazon EBS volumes in the Amazon EC2 console to create an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy that's used to manage snapshots of the EBS volumes. An Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy creates and deletes snapshots according to the policy schedule. This saves you on costs and effort because you don't have to match the snapshots manually.

To create an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console.
2. Make sure that all the EBS volumes that you want Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to manage have at least one tag with a key-value pair.
3. Select the desired EBS volumes, choose Actions, and then choose Create snapshot lifecycle policy.
4. All the tags for the EBS volumes selected in the previous step are automatically prefilled under Target resource tags.
5. Define the rest of the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy, including the creation frequency and retention period.
   For step-by-step instructions, see Automating Amazon EBS snapshot and AMI management using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.
6. After creating the policy, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager automatically creates and deletes snapshots based on the policy schedule.

Troubleshooting tips

• To create an EBS snapshot lifecycle policy, your EBS volumes must have at least one tag with both a key and a value. If you select one or more volumes that don't have any tags, and then select Create a snapshot lifecycle policy in the Amazon EC2 console, you receive an error.
• When you select an EBS volume with multiple tags, and at least one tag has both a key and a value, Create snapshot lifecycle policy is prefilled with tags with both keys and values. Any tags with a key but no value aren't prefilled.
• All the tags of your selected EBS volumes are prefilled with both keys and values. When other volumes aren't selected, but they have at least one of the prefilled tags, the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy creates and manages the snapshots for those volumes.
• The total number of unique tags in your selected EBS volumes can't be greater than 45.
• When you remove tags from EBS volumes after a policy is created, the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager can no longer create snapshots of those volumes. Refer to the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager documentation for more information.