Price EBS snapshots as the incremental blocks they really are, and compare that with full-size Snapshot Archive copies.
Only the first EBS snapshot of a volume is anything like full size; every later one stores just the blocks that changed, and all of them share the unchanged blocks, so thirty daily snapshots cost far less than thirty copies. Snapshot Archive inverts that: it is a much cheaper per-GB rate but stores a full, independent copy with a 90-day minimum, so it only wins for snapshots you keep for a long time and rarely restore. All rates are user-supplied list prices to confirm on the AWS EBS pricing page for your region. Budgets built on volume size times snapshot count routinely overstate snapshot spend by an order of magnitude, and the same misunderstanding is why teams archive snapshots that were cheaper left incremental.
Snapshot Cost
standard snapshot GiB = used GiB + (snapshots − 1) x changed GiB; archive GiB = archived snapshots x used GiB, because archived copies are full.
standard snapshot GiB = used GiB + (snapshots − 1) x changed GiB; archive GiB = archived snapshots x used GiB, because archived copies are full. Only the first EBS snapshot of a volume is anything like full size; every later one stores just the blocks that changed, and all of them share the unchanged blocks, so thirty daily snapshots cost far less than thirty copies. Snapshot Archive inverts that: it is a much cheaper per-GB rate but stores a full, independent copy with a 90-day minimum, so it only wins for snapshots you keep for a long time and rarely restore. All rates are user-supplied list prices to confirm on the AWS EBS pricing page for your region.
Budgets built on volume size times snapshot count routinely overstate snapshot spend by an order of magnitude, and the same misunderstanding is why teams archive snapshots that were cheaper left incremental.
This calculator takes 7 inputs: Provisioned volume size, Share of the volume actually written, Blocks changed between snapshots, Standard snapshots retained, Standard snapshot price, Snapshots moved to Snapshot Archive, Snapshot Archive price. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
No. Deleting a snapshot only frees blocks no remaining snapshot references, so removing one snapshot from the middle of a chain often reclaims almost nothing.