Overview

At the time of writing this, deleting EBS snapshots from EC2 is currently a very tedious task. You can do it only one by one, and if you have a backup methodology of daily/hourly backup, you soon get too many snapshots.

This is a short script meant to imitate a "ec2-delete-old-snapshots" command, until the guys at AWS issue one themselves.

Requirements

• PHP 5
• This script requires the Amazon EC2 PHP library, which is bundled here for convenience.(The library home is at: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1669)

Installation

Fill in your AWS keys on the two top define statements on ec2-delete-old-snapshots.php:

define('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', '<Your AWS Access Key>');
define('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', '<Your AWS Secret Access Key>');

Usage

Currently written in PHP for speedy development:

php ec2-delete-old-snapshots.php -v vol-id [-v vol-id ...] -o days

Example

php ec2-delete-old-snapshots.php -v vol-aabbccdd -v vol-bbccddee -o 7

Will delete all snapshots older than 7 days for volumes vol-aabbccdd and vol-bbccddee.

Failsafe

The program checks to see that each vol-id entered on the command line has at least one newer snapshot than the deletion date, to prevent deletion of all snapshots of a certain volume. The deletion process will commence for a volume only if such a snapshot was found.

Disclaimer

This program is in development. Although it has been tested and worked on production environments, it can't be guaranteed to perform without unexpected results. Use at your own risk.