I have some Windows servers hosted on Amazon EC2. Some run Windows Server 2003 and other run Windows Server 2008. These are EBS-backed instances. Most of the instances also have some additional EBS-volumes attached.

We want to schedule a daily snapshot of the windows machines (and also the attached EBS-volumes) to S3 so that we have daily backups available.

One would think that this is a very common requirement and would be made available via the AWS Management Console, but alas, it is not. What approaches are available? How do I schedule daily snapshots on our Windows Servers?

There are several scripting examples available online for Linux, but not so much for windows. I have had a look at http://sehmer.blogspot.com/2011/04/amazon-ec2-daily-snapshot-script-for.html as well as https://github.com/ronmichael/aws-snapshot-scheduler. Has anyone used one of these approaches and does it work?

I have also considered a service like Skeddly which seems inexpensive at first glance but when you look at using it for several servers the price soon escalates to such a point where it seems a better option to create your own solution as you can then apply it to new servers in the future. With Skeddly we'll pay for each server.

How do we schedule daily snapshots of our windows instances?