Cleanup old EBS snapshots

by: Mike Heffner | posted: April 16th, 2010

At Librato we rely on Amazon EBS as part of our Silverline infrastructure. Accordingly, we periodically snapshot our EBS volumes in case of data loss. I wanted to find a script that would cleanup our sprawl of snapshots that accumulated over time.

A quick search found a number of PHP solutions, but we have stuck with mostly BASH and Ruby for infrastructure scripting so far so we didn’t want another dependency. Anyways, I stumbled across this Ruby script over at ElastDream which did most of what I was looking for. However, I wanted to be able to specify a minimum number of snapshots to keep, regardless of time, so that you can’t accidentally delete all snapshots for a particular volume.

This script supports the following configuration options:

Usage: cleanup_snapshots [options] <volume>

    -h, --help           Display this screen
        --key KEY        Amazon access key
        --secret KEY     Amazon secret key
        --days DAYS      How many days back to keep (default: 15)
        --min KEEP       Minimum number of snapshots to keep (default: 5)
        --verbose        Enable verbose output
        --uri URI        Use this EC2 URI instead of default (e.g. EU-West)

Find the source below, hope this is helpful for others. ;-)