I just realized that my aws instance count has risen into the double digits. I'm currently backing portions of my folders and dbs and moving them off to a backup instance.

What I think I should be doing is taking a snapshot of the instances (automatically) and persisting them on S3 so I have a running 7 day collection of daily backups.

There is a question asking the same thing here, however the answers don't go into depth.

So the closest answer seems to be: use a cron job to snapshot the instance. So do I run the cron job on the instance itself? or do I have a micro instance to run these snapshots?

Could I get an example script or the command for say a linux flavor? what software must I have installed to get this to run?

Thanks.