AWS boto Get Snapshots in Time Period

Question

I'm using AWS and pulling snapshots using boto ("The Python interface to Amazon Web Services"). I'm pulling all snapshots using conn.get_all_snapshots(), but I only want to retrieve the necessary data. I'm using a calendar to view the snapshots, so it would be very helpful if I could only pull the snapshots within the current month I'm viewing.

Is there a restriction (maybe a filter) I can put on the conn.get_all_snapshots() to only retrieve the snapshots within the month?

Here are boto docs if necessary: http://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ref/ec2.html

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 22 '14 at 16:59

0

I'm not aware of any way to do this. The EC2 API allows you to filter results based on snapshot ID's or by various filters such as status or progress. There is even a filter for create-time but unfortunately there is no way to specify a range of times and have it return everything in between. And there is no way to use < or > operators in the filter query.

answered Jul 22 '14 at 16:59

garnaat

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This seems very necessary, especially because I don't want to save thousands of snapshots in the backend. Is there any solution? – user3822146 Jul 22 '14 at 17:02
1

Well, you could always store the timestamps and snapshot IDs in DynamoDB or some other database and query that to find the snapshot IDs you want to retrieve. – garnaat Jul 22 '14 at 21:29
Ok. Think I'll shy away from that. Thanks for the response anyways. BTW boto rocks in every other way. – user3822146 Jul 22 '14 at 21:35

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Use the snapshot's start_time field (which is a string, so it'll need to be parsed):

import datetime

# Fetch all snaps
snaps = conn.get_all_snapshots()
# Get UTC of 30-days ago
cutoff = datetime.datetime.utcnow() - datetime.timedelta(days=30)
# datetime parsing format "2015-09-07T20:12:08.000Z"
DATEFORMAT = '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ'
# filter older
old_snaps = [s for s in snaps \
             if datetime.datetime.strptime(s.start_time, DATEFORMAT) < cutoff]
# filter newer
new_snaps = [s for s in snaps \
             if datetime.datetime.strptime(s.start_time, DATEFORMAT) >= cutoff]

old_snaps will contain the ones from before this month and new_snaps will contain the ones from this month. (I have the feeling you want to delete the old snaps, that's why I included the old_snaps line.)

I'm using datetime.strptime() above because it's builtin, but dateutil is more robust if you have it installed. (See this for details: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3908349/1293152)

AWS boto Get Snapshots in Time Period

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