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====== Recover lost Key Pair ======
<color darkorange>Jun 2017</color>
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===== Introduction =====
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To access (via SSH) an AWS EC2 Instance, you need the key that was generated when you created the EC2 Instance. This key should have been placed in a safe place, backed up (several times) etc. However, if you have lost your key, suffered hard disk failures or otherwise just been a bit clumsy, then you will no longer be able to access your EC2 Instance.
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You cannot recover lost AWS EC2 Key Pairs, so stop looking for that menu, it's not there. However, we can follow an almost identical process to this [[move_ec2_instance|Move EC2 Instance]]. In the Move EC2 Instance guide, we are moving an existing EC2 Instance from one Availability Zone (AZ) to another. In the process of the move we have to generate a new Key Pair, allowing access.
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So this means that if you make a copy of your EC2, which you can do from the EC2 Dashboard, you can then create a new EC2 instance from that copy, that is exacly the same as the old EC2 Instance, in this process you can create a new Key Pair that I am sure you wont lose this time :).
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The process is quite simple, and it goes like this:
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**Create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image).**\\ 
**Create new EC2 Instance from the AMI.**\\ 
**Create new Key Pair.**\\ 
**Delete AMI.**\\ 
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So use the [[move_ec2_instance|Move EC2 Instance]] guide and just ignore the part about changing Availability Zones.
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