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About AWS Recycle Bin
Updated over a year ago

Recycle Bin is a data recovery feature that enables you to restore accidentally deleted Amazon EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs. With Recycle Bin, you can now recover EBS snapshots from accidental deletion by setting a custom retention for deleted snapshots. In the event of an accidental deletion, snapshots can be retrieved directly from Recycle Bin with a single click or an API call.

You can enable Recycle Bin for all snapshots in an account, AWS region, or a subset of them based on tags, and configure the retention period for deleted snapshots. You can then recover these deleted snapshots within the retention window. A recovered snapshot retains all its metadata including tags, descriptions, and sharing permissions.

You may specify access permissions using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), so that only authorized admins can configure Recycle Bin.

Why Recycle Bin

Premature deletion of snapshots

Backup data may be accidentally or maliciously deleted, or users with access to the backup management interface may choose to delete or set backups to expire prior to the intended retention period. While this allows enterprises to manage and remove backups that are no longer important, this may be applied accidentally or maliciously to delete business-critical backups. With AWS Recycle Bin, you can retrieve such backups within the custom retention period configured.

Benefits

  • Business continuity: Protect business-critical data against accidental deletion to ensure business continuity

  • Data security: Safeguard from malicious threats and attacks

  • Data Governance: Ensure retention of critical snapshots as part of regulatory compliance

Supported resources

Recycle Bin supports the following resource types:

  • Amazon EBS snapshots

  • Amazon EBS-backed AMIs​​​

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