EBS snapshots are point-in-time copy of your EBS volumes and provide you with disaster recovery solutions for your EBS volumes. You can think of snapshots as full and incremental backups of your EBS volumes. When you create a snapshot of the EBS volume, only the data that is changed since the last snapshot is stored in the new S3 snapshot. In this way, it is an incremental backup. When you use a snapshot to restore the data, all the data from the snapshot is restored as well as all the data from the previous snapshot. This way, it is a full backup. Internally, EBS snapshots are chained together. Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3. However, you do not find your snapshot in any one of the S3 buckets. AWS just makes use of the Amazon S3 infrastructure to store your snapshot, but you cannot access them while they reside in S3.
You can do a number of things with the EBS...