AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Expanding the Size of a Volume
Expanding the Size of a Volume
As your application needs grow, you might want to expand your volume instead of adding more volumes
to your gateway. In this case, you can do one of the following:
• Create a snapshot of the volume you want to expand and then use the snapshot to create a new
volume of a larger size. For information about how to create a snapshot, see
. For information about how to use a snapshot to create a new volume, see
• Use the cached volume you want to expand to clone a new volume of a larger size. For information
about how to clone a volume, see
. For information about how to create a
.
Cloning a Volume
You can create a new volume from any existing cached volume in the same AWS Region. The new volume
is created from the most recent recovery point of the selected volume. A
volume recovery point
is a point
in time at which all data of the volume is consistent. To clone a volume, you choose the
Clone from last
recovery point
option in the
Create volume
dialog box, then select the volume to use as the source. The
following screenshot shows the
Create volume
dialog box.
Cloning from an existing volume is faster and more cost-effective than creating an Amazon EBS
snapshot. Cloning does a byte-to-byte copy of your data from the source volume to the new volume,
using the most recent recovery point from the source volume. Storage Gateway automatically creates
recovery points for your cached volumes. To see when the last recovery point was created, check the
TimeSinceLastRecoveryPoint
metric in Amazon CloudWatch.
The cloned volume is independent of the source volume. That is, changes made to either volume after
cloning have no effect on the other. For example, if you delete the source volume, it has no effect on the
cloned volume. You can clone a source volume while initiators are connected and it is in active use. Doing
so doesn't affect the performance of the source volume. For information about how to clone a volume,
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