Early in my career, I learned an important lesson: backup is easy, but restore is hard. Too often we take our backup and recovery for granted. We assume that if the backup completed successful, the restore will work when we need it. Anyone who has been through a disaster recovery exercise, whether simulated or real, knows this is seldom the case.

In this post I discuss creating consistent backups of Windows Servers using the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots. I will also use AWS Systems Manager to schedule daily backups of EBS volumes during a defined maintenance window. Feel free to follow along, but be aware that there is a CloudFormation template toward the end that will help you configure the final solution.