Share an Amazon EBS snapshot with other AWS accounts
You can modify the permissions of a snapshot if you want to share it with other AWS accounts. You can share snapshots publicly with all other AWS accounts, or you can share them privately with individual AWS accounts that you specify. Users that you have authorized can use the snapshots that you share to create their own EBS volumes, while your original snapshot remains unaffected.
Important
When you share a snapshot, you are giving others access to all of the data on the snapshot. Share snapshots only with people that you trust with all of your snapshot data.
To prevent the public sharing of snapshots, you can enable Block public access for Amazon EBS snapshots.
Topics
Before you share a snapshot
The following considerations apply to sharing snapshots:
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If block public access for snapshots is enabled for the Region, attempts to publicly share snapshots will be blocked. Snapshots can still be privately shared.
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Snapshots are constrained to the Region in which they were created. To share a snapshot with another Region, copy the snapshot to that Region and then share the copy. For more information, see Copy an Amazon EBS snapshot.
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You can't share snapshots that are encrypted with the default AWS managed key. You can only share snapshots that are encrypted with a customer managed key. For more information, see Creating Keys in the AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide.
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You can share only unencrypted snapshots publicly.
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When you share an encrypted snapshot, you must also share the customer managed key used to encrypt the snapshot. For more information, see Share the KMS key used to encrypt a shared Amazon EBS snapshot.
Share a snapshot
You can share a snapshot using one of the methods described in the section.
Determine the use of snapshots that you share
You can use AWS CloudTrail to monitor whether a snapshot that you have shared with others is copied or used to create a volume. The following events are logged in CloudTrail when an action is taken on a snapshot you have shared::
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SharedSnapshotCopyInitiated — A shared snapshot is being copied.
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SharedSnapshotVolumeCreated — A shared snapshot is being used to create a volume.
For more information about using CloudTrail, see Log Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS API calls with AWS CloudTrail.