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How to Setup Automated Lightsail Backups
Note: In the summer of 2019 AWS finally released built-in daily snapshots for Lightsail. The only option for this is one snapshot a day, with a maximum of 7 snapshots stored. So if you have very basic needs the below producure with be overkill for you, but if you want hourly backups, monthly backups, more than 7 backups, etc. feel free to use this method.
Amazon’s Lightsail is a great option if you want affordable hosting and the power of a virtual private server (VPS), but the lack of cost means a lack of convenient features. One of the most glaring of these missing features if Lightsail’s complete lack of automated backups. This is a glaring oversight for Lightsail and it’s especially odd given that Lightsail has a built in — and very easy to use — snapshot tool.
Lightsail snapshots are one-click backups of your entire instance, which are better than simple backups, but there is no way to automate them through the Lightsail UI.
Using Amazon Web Service’s API and AWS Lambda you can automate Lightsail snapshots without much difficulty. In fact, thanks to a good web Samaritan the code is already done, so you just need to do the setup on your AWS account.
Sal May 16th, 2019
Posted In: AWS