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I have an Amazon ec2 linux instance, with a separate EBS drive, 500Gb in size of which there is 80Gb of data. I want to share this data with a couple of other ec2 instances that I will be creating shortly, and just wondering what is the best way to do this.

Should I just rsync the data between them, or is there a way to mout the same EBS on two different instances at the same time?

I could also take a snapshot of the drive, and then when I provision the other instances I could specify to use that snapshot?

Which is the preferred way? The data is not going to change, it just needs read access.

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1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Snapshots are definitely the way to go here.

If the data's truly unchanging, I'd also shrink the EBS volumes you're creating from the snapshots to fit the data rather than wasting (and paying for!) half a terabyte.

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