Home/ Questions/Q 9101591
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-17T01:10:12+00:00

I thought I clearly understood the difference between instance-store and EBS backed AMIs. But

  • 0

I thought I clearly understood the difference between instance-store and EBS backed AMIs.
But http://aws.amazon.com/maintenance-help/ says “if you are running an EBS-backed AMI, you can stop and then restart your instance in order to easily re-launch it. This will cause the loss of any data you have saved on the local instance store of the instance,”

Stop/start does NOT lose the sysvol data, so this confuses me.

I’m assuming that here, by “local instance store”, they mean the backing EBS volume (the sysvol), and I’m thinking that they meant to say “terminate” instead of stop. Am I correct?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Terminating an EBS-backed instance will not cause your data to be deleted. You can still access the EBS volume until you delete it (unless you set it to delete when your instance is terminated).

    Local instance store refers to hard drive space on the actual physical server that is running your instance. You can see the available instance store by doing sudo fdisk -l. Some images come with some instance store volumes already mounted (see df -h). Otherwise you’ll have to mount and format the instance store volumes before you can use them.

    Data on an instance store volume is lost when you stop (not terminate) your instance because it is local to a physical server, and your instance might start up on a new server.

    • 0