What effect does deleting EC2 snapshots have?

Question

I'm not sure what effect deleting an EC2 snapshot has on the other ones. For example, if I snapshot an EBS volume 4 times and delete the oldest one, can I still do a full restore from the latest ones? In other words, is there any benefit in keeping old snapshots other than to save incremental changes?

Answer 1

• The only benefit you have by keeping the older snapshots is that you will be able to restore the older snapshots. 
• But if there is no need to keep them, you can delete it and it will not affect the new snapshots in any way. The new snapshots will still work.