title: How should I approach my EC2 contingency plan?
body: <p>I've browsed through other questions on SO concerning backing up EC2, and it has provided me with a good basis, but I'm still a bit confused as to how I should approach my solution and develop a contingency plan. Most questions are fairly specific, but I have a pretty vanilla setup, and I think this information will be beneficial to future users. Let me provide my basic setup:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Basic small instance</li>
  <li>Pushing files to S3</li>
  <li>Running MongoDB</li>
  <li>Running nginx</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Now, due to the ephemeral nature of EC2, it's apparent that I need to bind my EC2 instance to EBS to ensure persistent storage. The reason I'm attempting to develop a contingency plan is that I'm worried my instance may disappear at any time (due to outages, etc). If my instance were to disappear, I'm concerned that I would have to spin up a new instance and reinstall all my applications before getting everything up an running again. A few questions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>How do I backup my instance to ensure that if it were to disappear, I could quickly bring it back up (preferably without having to reinstall all previous software)? I don't need a series of backups, just the previous days (or weeks) backup to ensure that a previous working version exists that can be started quickly. </li>
  <li>If I use EBS instead of instance storage, it essentially acts in place of my hard drive right? So if I have MongoDB installed, I'm assuming the database it is writing to cab placed on EBS?</li>
  <li>If I go with the small instance with 160 GB of storage and I use EBS, would I need to allocate 160 GB of EBS out of the gate, or is the 160 GB for instance storage only?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So, in summary, I would like a solution (either manual or automatic) that can create a snapshot of my EC2 instance to ensure that if it were to disappear, it could be reconstructed without having to spend the time to manually reconstruct everything.</p>
  
  <p>In an ideal world, if my instance were to disappear, I could spin up an version of my instance  with everything intact (to a point where things were backed up). Any resources or suggestions? Thanks in advance.</p>