What effect does deleting EC2 snapshots have?

Question

I'm not sure what effect deleting an EC2 snapshot has on the other ones. For example, if I snapshot an EBS volume 4 times and delete the oldest one, can I still do a full restore from the latest ones? In other words, is there any benefit in keeping old snapshots other than to save incremental changes?

Weatherwise

Since you appear to be new to StackOverflow, I just want to remind you that it is considered proper etiquette to accept answers to your question (only if they actually answer it, of course). If several people have responded but you don't think that they actually answered it, you might want to edit your question to clarify it and getter better responses. – Multinational

Answer 1

The only benefit is being able to restore to the older snapshot. Deleting one snapshot does not effect any of the others. Feel free to get rid of the old ones. The new ones will still work.

Multinational

This is correct. Every snapshot is a full backup at that point in time. Yes, Amazon only stores the diffs, but they're smart enough not to delete blocks that are pointed to by any snapshot. Deleting the old one only deletes data that's not needed by other snapshots. – Gloss