AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Recovering Your Data: Best Practices
• If the cache disk is still accessible and useable, reconnect it to your gateway.
Note
If you delete a cache disk, tapes or volumes that have clean data (that is, for which data in the
cache disk and Amazon S3 are synchronized) will continue to be available when the gateway
resumes normal functionality. For example, if your gateway has three cache disks and you delete
two, tapes or volumes that are clean will have AVAILABLE status. Other tapes and volumes will
have IRRECOVERABLE status.
If you use ephemeral disks as cache disks for your gateway or mount your cache disks on an
ephemeral drive, your cache disks will be lost when you shut down the gateway. Shutting down
the gateway when your cache disk and Amazon S3 are not synchronized can result in data loss.
As a result, we don't recommend using ephemeral drives or disks.
Best Practices for Recovering Your Data
Although it is rare, your gateway might encounter an unrecoverable failure. Such a failure can occur
in your virtual machine (VM), the gateway itself, the local storage, or elsewhere. If a failure occurs, we
recommend that you follow the instructions in the appropriate section following to recover your data.
Important
AWS Storage Gateway doesn’t support recovering a gateway VM from a snapshot that is created
by your hypervisor or from your Amazon EC2 ami. If your gateway VM malfunctions, activate a
new gateway and recover your data to that gateway using the instructions following.
Topics
•
Recovering from an Unexpected Virtual Machine Shutdown (p. 338)
•
Recovering Your Data from a Malfunctioning Gateway or VM (p. 339)
•
Retrieving Your Data from an Irrecoverable Volume (p. 339)
•
Recovering Your Data from an Irrecoverable Tape (p. 340)
•
Recovering Your Data from a Malfunctioning Cache Disk (p. 340)
•
Recovering Your Data from a Corrupted File System (p. 340)
•
Recovering Your Data From An Inaccessible Data Center (p. 341)
Recovering from an Unexpected Virtual Machine
Shutdown
If your VM shuts down unexpectedly, for example during a power outage, your gateway becomes
unreachable. When power and network connectivity are restored, your gateway becomes reachable and
starts to function normally. Following are some steps you can take at that point to help recover your
data:
• If an outage causes network connectivity issues, you can troubleshoot the issue. For information about
how to test network connectivity, see
Testing Your Gateway Connection to the Internet (p. 260)
• For cached volumes and tapes setups, when your gateway becomes reachable, your volumes or tapes
go into BOOTSTRAPPING status. This functionality ensures that your locally stored data continues to
be synchronized with AWS. For more information on this status, see
• If your gateway malfunctions and issues occur with your volumes or tapes as a result of an unexpected
shutdown, you can recover your data. For information about how to recover your data, see the sections
following that apply to your scenario.
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