Move, Back Up, and Restore Writable Volumes

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.