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Attach a volume

5 minute read

A volume is extra NVMe disk for a server. It keeps its data when you resize or delete the server, and you can grow it at any time without downtime.

1. Create the volume

Open Volumes → Create volume. Give it a name of lowercase letters, numbers and dashes, pick a size from 10 GB to 2 TB and choose the server to attach it to.

Volumes cost ₦120 per GB a month, billed hourly. A 50 GB volume is ₦6,000 a month.

simplicloud volumes create data-01 --size 50 --attach web-1
✓ data-01 attached to web-1 at /mnt/data-01

2. Check the mount

New volumes are formatted ext4 and mounted at /mnt/<name> automatically, usually within a minute. Check from the server:

lsblk
df -h /mnt/data-01
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb         49G   24K   47G   1% /mnt/data-01

The mount is added to /etc/fstab, so it comes back after a reboot.

3. Grow it

Volumes only grow. Pick Resize on the volume, choose the new size and confirm. The disk resizes live; then grow the filesystem on the server:

sudo resize2fs /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0SC_data-01
df -h /mnt/data-01

4. Move it to another server

A volume attaches to one server at a time, in the same project. Unmount it, detach it, then attach it to the other server:

# on web-1
sudo umount /mnt/data-01
# on your computer
simplicloud volumes detach data-01
simplicloud volumes attach data-01 --server web-2

5. Back it up

Volumes aren't in nightly server backups. Take a snapshot before risky changes, or copy important data to Spaces.