AWS How to Copy EBS Volumes to Different Account

It is common for an organization to have multiple AWS accounts, In my opinion, it’s a best practice to have different accounts for DEV, QA, and PROD environments. One of the reasons, just in case of any security compromise your other accounts would be unaffected.

Managing multiple accounts could be a challenge as well. Recently, I published an article on Cross-account copying of EC2 Instances. I thought it would be cool to share on how to do the same with EBS volumes, so here we go.

Obtaining Target AWS Account ID

To obtain AWS account ID a simple solution is to do the following

1. Log in to AWS console on the target account
2. Click on the top right corner Support > Support Center
3. Copy the AWS Account ID and paste it into your favorite notepad, we will need it later

Create a Snapshot of EBS Volume

1. To create a snapshot of EBS volume, log in to AWS console and click on Volumes under EC2 > Elastic Block Store
2. Select the volume of your choice, Right-click or choose to Create Snapshot from the Actions Menu
3. Enter Volume description and click Create Snapshot
4. Verify the snapshot created

Verify Snapshot in Target Account

1. Login to AWS console using target account, click on the EC2 > Elastic Block Store > Snapshots
2. Choose Private Snapshots from the filter
3. There you go, you can create a new EBS volume in target account using the shared snapshot