AWS EC2 Snapshot backup

REF: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13834324/amazon-ec2-ebs-backup-ami-vs-snapshot

EBS Snapshots are an excellent way to create backups.

You can perform frequent Snapshots of your EBS Volumes via scripts. Weekly, Daily, Hourly, or as frequently as your Credit Card will allow. The only limit is around how many simultaneous snapshots you can be doing - when you hit that, the EBS API will start giving back errors until a few of the in-flight operations complete.

Snapshots can also be copied from Region to Region in order to provide backup against a catastrophic event.

When you snapshot an EBS volume, that snapshot is of the entire volume. Even if it was created from an AMI, your snapshot contains everything you need to create a new instance of the volume. You can pretty easily try this yourself.