Question: I have several Amazon AWS EC2 virtual machines that I created on AWS EC2. They were not imported, they were created there. I would like to export these machines in order to achieve local backups, and a local testing environment. 

I have looked a lot of places, and found tons of information that says you can only export a VM from EC2 if you imported into EC2 originally. I have also found information that says you can only import into EC2 if the machine was originally exported from EC2. 

My question is, is it possible to export a VM that was built on EC2, and somehow get it locally. I have read that you have to back it up to an S3 Bucket, and then download it, but Amazon's [documentation](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vm-import/) says that you can only export it from there if it was originally imported.

Here are the links on serverfault that I found this question asked, but not answered.

[Copy an Amazon EC2 Instance to use locally](https://serverfault.com/questions/505705/copy-an-amazon-ec2-instance-to-use-locally)

[Archiving Amazon AWS instances](https://serverfault.com/questions/565382/archiving-amazon-aws-instances)

Answer: 
1. Yes pfsense is the perfect tool what you are trying to accomplish, and much more.
2 & 3. pfsense has certain packages that can help e.g. squid proxy and squid guard. 
[A simple howto to install squid, squid guard, ACL and blacklisting.](https://www.howtoforge.com/pfsense-squid-squidguard-traffic-shaping-tutorial)
Definitely use Squid proxy. It understands URL's.  

Most free firewalls just understand IP addresses and ports right now.  

You can do simple IP based filters for source IP's (admins vs normal users)  

You can do regex based destination url filters (for blacklist/whitelists)  

You can do use authentication to do more sophisticated filtering  

The squid docs can be tough going but check out <https://workaround.org/squid-acls> for a relatively easy intro.