AWS – Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) now adds full snapshot size information in Console and API

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) now displays the full snapshot size for EBS Snapshots. With this enhancement, customers can now retrieve full snapshot sizes programmatically through the DescribeSnapshots API using the new field, full-snapshot-size-in-bytes. The full snapshot size is also displayed in the EBS Snapshots console under the new ‘Full snapshot size’ column.

Since EBS Snapshots are incremental in nature, if you take multiple snapshots of a volume over time, each snapshot only stores the new or modified blocks while maintaining references to unchanged blocks from previous snapshots.
The ‘full snapshot size’ field shows you the total size of all blocks that make up a snapshot, including both the blocks stored directly in that snapshot and all blocks referenced from previous snapshots. For instance, if you have a 100 GB volume with 50 GB of data, the ‘full snapshot size’ would show 50 GB regardless of whether it’s the first snapshot or a subsequent one.

The ‘full snapshot size’ field provides crucial information about your EBS snapshot storage, such as the total size of the snapshot in the archived tier or the amount of data written to the source volume at the time the snapshot was created. Please note that this is different from the incremental snapshot size, which only refers to the size of newly changed blocks stored in that specific snapshot.

This feature is now generally available in all commercial AWS regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, see the EBS Snapshots user guide and API specification.

Read More for the details.