By Channy Yun (윤석찬) on 09 SEP 2026 in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Launch, News, Storage
Last year we launched Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones, a feature that lets you instantly create point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.
Today we’re extending Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes in other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the destination account.
With this new capability, you can use your most current application data for development, testing, and experimentation in a secondary environment while keeping production data protected and isolated. For example, you can refresh test and development environments that live in separate accounts by creating copies of a production environment with the EBS encryption settings you need.
Copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts in action
To copy an EBS volume to another account, the volume owner first grants the target account access to that volume using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), which lets you share resources across AWS accounts or within an AWS Organization. Then, from the target account, they locate the volume they have access to and create a copy.
To get started, choose Share volume for the volume you want to share with the target account in the Amazon EBS console.
Share the volume with other AWS accounts by adding it to existing resource shares, or create a new resource share in the AWS RAM console. For more details, refer to the AWS RAM User Guide.
You can now see confirmation that the volume has been shared in the Volume sharing tab of the volume detail page.
A target account must accept the resource share on the RAM console.
Once they accept the resource share, they can see the volumes in the EBS volume page of the target account. Choose Copy volume for any shared volume.
To share and copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts programmatically, including calling APIs and searching documentation, try the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI coding tool. To learn more, visit the Amazon EBS User Guide.
Things to know
Let me share some important technical details that I think you’ll find useful.
- Encryption: You can share unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with a customer managed key (CMK). Volumes encrypted with the default AWS managed key (AMK) cannot be shared. When copying a shared volume encrypted with a CMK, the CMK must also be shared with the target account. You can specify a different CMK to re-encrypt the copy in the target account.
- Monitoring: You can monitor SharedVolumeCopyInitiated through AWS CloudTrail event in your account. You will also receive events in Amazon EventBridge at the start of the copy operation when the state of the copied volume is initializing, and at the end of the operation when the state of the copied volume changes to completed. You can see the shared volume ID, consuming account ID, and event time.
- Pricing: Once a copy is initiated, you’ll pay a one-time fee based on your volume size, charged to the account where the copy will reside. There’s no cost for sharing EBS volumes through AWS RAM. The copied volume will incur regular EBS volume charges upon creation.
- Availability Zone: The volume copy must be created in the same Availability Zone as the source volume. Use Availability Zone IDs (such as use1-az1) to identify the same physical location across accounts.
Now available
Cross-account volume clones for Amazon EBS are available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region.
Give this feature a try in the Amazon EC2 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EBS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.
— Channy
Channy Yun (윤석찬) Channy is a Lead Blogger of AWS News Blog and Principal Developer Advocate for AWS Cloud. As an open web enthusiast and blogger at heart, he loves community-driven learning and sharing of technology.
