You are charged for EBS storage for the amount of storage provisioned to your account, measured in "gigabyte-months." EC2 instances accrue charges only while they're running, but EBS volumes attached to instances continue to retain information and accrue charges, even when the instance is stopped. For more information about how EBS is billed, see

EBS snapshots are billed at a lower rate than active EBS volumes are. You can minimize your EBS charges but retain the information stored in EBS for later use by creating a snapshot of the volume as a backup and then deleting the active volume. Later, when you need the information stored in the snapshot, you can