Difficulty: Easy
Description
EBS snapshots are incremental backups stored in Amazon S3. Over time, accounts accumulate large numbers of old snapshots from manual backups, automated lifecycle policies without expiry rules, or terminated instances that are never used for restoration. Snapshots older than 1 year represent a significant and often overlooked storage cost with no active business value. Deleting them eliminates this recurring cost while recent snapshots remain available for recovery purposes.
Selection Criteria
The EBS snapshot is older than 365 days (1 year)
The snapshot is not referenced by an AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
The snapshot is not the only remaining backup of a volume that still exists
Expected Saving
EBS snapshots are billed at $0.05/GB/month based on the actual data stored (incremental — only changed blocks since the last snapshot count).
Scenario | Monthly cost eliminated |
500 GB of old snapshots | ~$25/month |
2 TB of old snapshots | ~$100/month |
10 TB of old snapshots | ~$500/month |
Note: Snapshot storage is incremental — the full GB shown per snapshot in AWS Console does not always reflect the actual billed size. The billed amount is the delta (changed blocks) since the previous snapshot in the chain.
⚠️ Compliance note: Some organizations are required to retain backups for regulatory reasons (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA). Verify retention requirements before deleting any snapshot older than 1 year.
Operational Impact
⚠️ Deleting a snapshot is irreversible. Once deleted, the data cannot be recovered.
Snapshots referenced by AMIs cannot be deleted without first deregistering the AMI — these are excluded by the selection criteria.
Verify that no restore plan or DR runbook depends on the specific snapshot before deleting.
Deleting old snapshots in a chain may affect the size billing of newer snapshots (AWS redistributes changed block accounting), but does not affect the ability to restore from the remaining snapshots.