You can move Writable Volumes from one storage to another. You can also take backups of the volumes and restore them.
You can back up a single volume, or multiple volumes, but you can only restore a single volume. You can also schedule App Volumes Manager to take regular backups of the Writable Volumes.
Note: Storage Groups are not supported for the move, back up, and restore operations.
Thin Provisioning and Writable Volumes
If you move or back up a writable to a storage that does not support thin provisioning, the volume is expanded and becomes a flat VMDK on the destination storage. You can see the expanded size on the Backup Writable and Move Writable screens. For example, Move Writable Volume for user1 - 400.00 MB (expanded: 10.00 GB)
If you restore a volume that is flat, it will remain flat, and will not get converted back to a sparse volume.
Using Shared Datastores for Writable Volumes Operations
You must have a shared datastore between the source and destination vCenter Server to move and back up volumes across different vCenter Servers and if the source volumes are located in a non-shared datastore.
To back up a Writable Volume across different vCenter Servers, with the volume located in a non-shared datastore, you must first move the volume to a shared datastore, and then back up the volume to the destination datastore.
See Support for Shared Datastores for information about shared datastores.
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