How to Find Old EBS Snapshots Costing Money in AWS

#devops #aws #cloud #tutorial

Old EBS snapshots are a common AWS storage leak. A snapshot may only cost a few
dollars per month, but stale snapshots across regions and accounts can quietly
pile up.

This guide shows how to find old snapshots safely.

Why Old Snapshots Matter

EBS snapshots are incremental, but they still store changed blocks. Keeping old
snapshots forever can create long-term storage cost, especially when snapshots
come from retired instances, old migrations, or abandoned backup jobs.

AWS CLI Command

List snapshots owned by your account:

aws ec2 describe-snapshots \
  --owner-ids self \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --query 'Snapshots[].{SnapshotId:SnapshotId,StartTime:StartTime,VolumeSize:VolumeSize,Description:Description}' \
  --output table

Find Snapshots Older Than 90 Days

You can use jq for a more precise local filter:

cutoff=$(date -u -v-90d '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')

aws ec2 describe-snapshots \
  --owner-ids self \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --output json |
jq -r --arg cutoff "$cutoff" '
  .Snapshots[]
  | select(.StartTime < $cutoff)
  | [.SnapshotId, .StartTime, .VolumeSize, .Description]
  | @tsv
'

On Linux, replace the date command with:

cutoff=$(date -u -d '90 days ago' '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')

Check All Regions

Snapshots are regional:

for region in $(aws ec2 describe-regions --query 'Regions[].RegionName' --output text); do
  echo "Region: $region"
  aws ec2 describe-snapshots \
    --owner-ids self \
    --region "$region" \
    --query 'Snapshots[].{SnapshotId:SnapshotId,StartTime:StartTime,VolumeSize:VolumeSize}' \
    --output table
done